Measures of Belief and Plausibility: A Systematic Approach to the Analysis of Evidence

摘要

The history of criminal investigation is marked with numerous celebrated cases for which the outcomes remain dubious at best. In most of these cases, questions concerning guilt and innocence remain as the result of influences related to politics, public opinion, national security and perhaps most importantly, an inability to successfully manage the complexity of available evidence.rnThe possibility of error in virtually all criminal investigations will always exist because of these factors, but there are ways in which evidence can be evaluated much more rigorously and systematically than by traditional methods. Fuzzy measures may be used for this purpose, with measures of belief and plausibility providing but a few of the means by which a body of evidence may be evaluated with a high degree of precision. It will be the purpose of this paper to apply such measures based on the following assumptions: (1) it is possible to accurately focus on available evidence through a systematic approach, and (2) evidence most relevant to a case can be determined by objective means.rnProcedures are applied to evidence relevant to the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy. The basis for a systematic and rationale approach to the analysis of evidence in this case is demonstrated.