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Originally Posted by blankoblanco
What's interesting to think about is that DNA evidence is often used for pretty automatic convictions in court. The statistics behind Postle's hands are literally more compelling than DNA evidence. Statistically speaking it is more likely to get a false positive from a DNA test than for Postle to have done this legitimately. Yet no court will understand poker or statistics well enough to grasp this, so it all comes down to if people rat him out.
DNA evidence is accepted now but when I started prosecuting homicides and sex assault cases in the 90's it was not accepted or understood by the general public. These days DNA evidence will give probabilities of a match in the billions, back then it was often in the millions. Juries had a very hard time understanding this - they expected dna testing to show that the match to a certain person was certain. We had to find ways to explain the probabilities to them that they could grasp. I remember a case where the dna result that stated there was 1 in 2.5 million that the dna sample wasn't from the defendant. I asked the jury to close their eyes and imagine a swimming pool filled with 2.5 million red gum balls, then I pulled a blue gumball out of my pocket and said now throw this blue gumball into that swimming pool. That is the chance of this defendant not being the perpetrator of this crime and (holding up the blue gumball while pointing at the defendant) said and the defendant is that blue gumball. I got a conviction in that case but my point is that convincing a jury of lay people to convict based upon statistical evidence is difficult.
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At the end of the day a long shot is a long shot: most people will understand that. DNA is different in that average everyday people accept DNA findings as bullet proof, DNA is perceived by the general population a certain way. I don't know what the average everyday person "thinks" about poker winrates, etc.
This is also a good point. This type of evidence is different from dna evidence because of the way poker is perceived by the general public. Many people think that poker is just luck. Thus, they might easily be convinced that even if MP wasn't that good he just got lucky for a period of time.
I am not stating that a criminal prosecution is impossible or even that it couldn't result in a conviction. However, having done 100's of jury trials both as a prosecutor and as a criminal defense attorney, I can attest that the average juror is easily confused by statistical evidence and this tends to favor the defense.