Defendant's Fallacy

The counterpart to the prosecutor's fallacy. In a court case with scientific and other evidence, it is not grouping the evidence together. For example, assuming a city of ten million, a one in a million DNA characteristic gives any one person that has it a 1 in 10 chance of being guilty, or a 90% chance of being innocent. However, when you factor in some other piece of evidence in conjunction with this scientific evidence, you get a much smaller probability of innocence.

See also Interrogator's Fallacy and Prosecutor's Fallacy.

This bit of jargon has been viewed 14,283 times.

Return To Logical Fallacies Jargon