Prosecutor's Fallacy
A fallacy of statistical reasoning, typically used by the prosecution to argue for the guilt of a defendant during a criminal trial.
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Origin
The term was coined by psychologists William C. Thompson and Edward Schumann in their 1987 article "Interpretation of Statistical Evidence in Criminal Trials" in Law and Human Behavior. The paper examined how jurors misinterpret statistical evidence, particularly confusing the probability of a match given innocence with the probability of innocence given a match. Their work identified systematic errors in legal reasoning about conditional probabilities, establishing foundational understanding of statistical fallacies in courtrooms.
Updated February 22, 2026