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Originally Posted by lkasigh
You seem to have missed the point of my question. You're claiming that the short search time is indicative of a frame up based on the a priori low probability of the car being found in 15 minutes or less (which you estimate as between 1/4000 and 1/4).
I'm just pointing up the relative difficulty in finding one particular car among 4000 in what appears to me to be a very short time frame. You do notice that I mention that there is a real possibility that it was pure chance.
On the other hand if she was clued in where to look,
that would explain the short time frame without having to resort to dumb luck or a miracle.
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The point you're overlooking is that the a priori probability of a frame up - let alone of this particular private investigator being involved in it - is much lower. I don't know if you've heard the old riddle about a medical test with a 1% false positive rate for a disease with a 1/1000 incidence in the population - only ~10% of people who test positive actually have the disease. Here your false positive rate may be 1/4000, but what is your incidence rate (i.e., the prior likelihood of a massive frame-up)?
But I'm not interested in an abstract problem. I am looking at a particular real world situation, where (in my opinion) the police framed Steven on a prior occasion. That history is also a data point.
"
A posteriori knowledge or justification is dependent on experience or empirical evidence, as with most aspects of science and personal knowledge."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori
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You also haven't provided any reason why a short search time should be considered evidence of framing. Assuming your 1/4000 probability - that 1/4000 shot might hit totally by chance in the case of a frame-up or in the case of an honest investigation. For it to serve as evidence of a frame-up you have to show why it is substantially more likely in the case of a frame-up than in the case of an honest investigation.
As I thought I had adequately explained:
if the odds are against Pam of God walking directly to the vehicle she's hunting for,
then that event calls for some sort of explanation.
As I have already pointed out several times, it
could be dumb luck.
On the other hand, a possible explanation is that she was
directed where to look, perhaps the map she was given at the outset of her search, along with the Sheriff's phone number and a camera.
Again, this is not an abstract problem - this is a situation which has a context. So
a priori reasoning will not be very helpful. Honestly, I don't think we have enough data to even know
a priori whether a police investigation will be honest.
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So to return to the medical example - the test is 100% likely to be positive if you have the disease and only 1% likely if you don't, making it pretty powerful evidence, though not conclusive. How likely is a short search time in the case of a frame-up? You haven't shown this.
Until we have
complete data on frame ups and their percentage among legit investigations I cannot satisfy your request for accurate odds on whether a randomly chosen case might be a frame or not.
In this case we have precedent, so I have to give the frame up hypothesis rather more weight than I might if there were no such history.
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In fact, in the case of the key found in Avery's home, you consider the long search time as evidence of framing. You are assuming a very strange relationship between search time and framing, for which you have not provided any support.
Seven searches of a tiny bedroom in a manufactured home. I'd suggest there's a meaningful
difference between searching 40 acres and searching a room in a manufactured home. Steven's bedroom is a few dozen square feet being searched several times by law enforcement professionals. The other is tens of thousands of square feet with only two searchers.
We also have to figure in to the key situation the fact that the keys allegedly appeared in plain sight next to a small book case, where cops searching the room would have to step over them every time they entered and left the room.
The most likely explanation is that the keys were not there on earlier searches.