I skimmed Leeson’s paper, and it looks like it has no quantitative evidence for the true accuracy of trial by ordeal. It has quantitative evidence for one of the other predictions he makes with his theory (the prediction that most people who go through ordeals are exonerated by them, which prediction is supported by the corresponding numbers, though not resoundingly), but Leeson doesn’t know what the actual hit rate of trial by orderal is.
This doesn’t mean Leeson’s a bad guy or anything—I bet no one can get a good estimate of trial by ordeal’s accuracy, since we’re here too late to get the necessary data. But it does mean he’s exaggerating (probably unconsciously) the implications of his paper—ultimately, his model will always fit the data as long as sufficiently many people believed trial by ordeal was accurate, independent of true accuracy. So the fact that his model pretty much fits the data is not strong evidence of true accuracy. Given that Leeson’s model fits the data he does have, and the fact that fact-finding methods were relatively poor in medieval times, I think your ‘interesting proposition’ #1 is quite likely, but we don’t gain much new information about #2.
I skimmed Leeson’s paper, and it looks like it has no quantitative evidence for the true accuracy of trial by ordeal. It has quantitative evidence for one of the other predictions he makes with his theory (the prediction that most people who go through ordeals are exonerated by them, which prediction is supported by the corresponding numbers, though not resoundingly), but Leeson doesn’t know what the actual hit rate of trial by orderal is.
This doesn’t mean Leeson’s a bad guy or anything—I bet no one can get a good estimate of trial by ordeal’s accuracy, since we’re here too late to get the necessary data. But it does mean he’s exaggerating (probably unconsciously) the implications of his paper—ultimately, his model will always fit the data as long as sufficiently many people believed trial by ordeal was accurate, independent of true accuracy. So the fact that his model pretty much fits the data is not strong evidence of true accuracy. Given that Leeson’s model fits the data he does have, and the fact that fact-finding methods were relatively poor in medieval times, I think your ‘interesting proposition’ #1 is quite likely, but we don’t gain much new information about #2.
(Edit—it might also be possible to incorporate ordeal-like tests into modern police work! ‘Machine is never wrong, son.’)