Citation

Kapsner A. Synthese 2022; 200(6): e438.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s11229-022-03918-1

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In the decision to the British appeals case Re H (Minors), Judge Lord Nicholls, talking about criminal behavior, stated that "that the more serious the allegation the less likely it is that the event occurred". There is actually quite a bit of discussion about the conclusions that should be drawn from this observation in the literature, but I have not found much discussion of the question whether the observation is right. I find this surprising, and in this essay I want to inspect this question.

This essay deals with a purported correlation between the severity of crimes and their frequency that has been claimed to hold in an important British case. Roughly, the claimed correlation is that more serious crimes occur less frequently. As Britain is a common law country and, consequently, much weight is put on precedent and earlier judgments, it is important to be sure to fully understand such claims. However, given the broad nature of the claim, its interest goes far beyond common law jurisdictions...

Language: en

Keywords

Crime statistics; Criminal and civil cases; Likelihood of crimes; Lord Nicholls; Severity of crimes; Standard of proof