Word: sinetar
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Dates: during 1965-1965
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Confidently answering yes, a jury has convicted the couple of second-degree robbery because Prosecutor Ray Sinetar, 30, cannily invoked a totally new test of circumstantial evidence-the laws of statistical probability...
...presenting his case, Prosecutor Sinetar stressed what he felt sure was already in the jurors' minds: the improbability that at any one time there could be two couples as distinctive as the Collinses in San Pedro in a yellow car. To "refine the jurors' thinking," Sinetar then explained how mathematicians calculate the probability that a whole set of possibilities will occur at once. Take three abstract possibilities (A, B, C), and assign to each a hypothetical probability factor. A, for example, may have a probability...
After an expert witness approved Sinetar's technique, the young prosecutor asked the jury to consider the six known factors in the Collins case: a blonde white woman, a ponytail hairdo, a bearded man, a Negro man, a yellow car, an interracial couple. Then he suggested probability factors ranging from 1-to-4 odds that a girl in San Pedro would be blonde to 1-to-1,000 odds that the couple would be Negro-white. Multiplied together, the factors produced odds of 1 to 12 million that the Collinses could have been duplicated in San Pedro...
Public Defender Donald Ellertson strenuously objected on grounds that the mathematics of probability were irrelevant, and that Sinetar's probability factors were inadmissible as assumptions rather than facts. Sinetar, however, merely estimated the factors before inviting the jurors to substitute their own. And the public defender will not appeal because he found no trial errors strong enough to outweigh the strong circumstantial evidence. Convicted by math, Malcolm Collins received a sentence of one year to life. Janet Collins got "not less than one year...
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