Serious nitpicking going on here. The whole point of my post is that from the information provided, one should arrive at probabilities close to what I said.
It’s not “nitpicking” to calibrate your probabilities correctly. If someone was to answer innocent with probability 0.999, they should be wrong about one time in a thousand.
So what evidence was available to achieve such confidence? No DNA, no bloodstains, no phone calls, no suspects fleeing the country, no testimony. Just a couple of websites. People make stuff up on websites all the time. I wouldn’t have assigned .999 probability to the hypothesis that there even was a trial if I hadn’t heard of it (glancingly) prior to your post.
[edit: I’m referring only to responders who, like me, based their answer on a quick read of the links you provided. Of course more evidence was available for those who took the time to follow up on it, and they should have had correspondingly higher confidence. I don’t think your answer was wrong based on what you knew, but it would have been horribly wrong based on what we knew.]
It’s not “nitpicking” to calibrate your probabilities correctly. If someone was to answer innocent with probability 0.999, they should be wrong about one time in a thousand.
So what evidence was available to achieve such confidence? No DNA, no bloodstains, no phone calls, no suspects fleeing the country, no testimony. Just a couple of websites. People make stuff up on websites all the time. I wouldn’t have assigned .999 probability to the hypothesis that there even was a trial if I hadn’t heard of it (glancingly) prior to your post.
[edit: I’m referring only to responders who, like me, based their answer on a quick read of the links you provided. Of course more evidence was available for those who took the time to follow up on it, and they should have had correspondingly higher confidence. I don’t think your answer was wrong based on what you knew, but it would have been horribly wrong based on what we knew.]