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Building Bayesian networks for legal evidence with narratives: a case study evaluation

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Abstract

In a criminal trial, evidence is used to draw conclusions about what happened concerning a supposed crime. Traditionally, the three main approaches to modeling reasoning with evidence are argumentative, narrative and probabilistic approaches. Integrating these three approaches could arguably enhance the communication between an expert and a judge or jury. In previous work, techniques were proposed to represent narratives in a Bayesian network and to use narratives as a basis for systematizing the construction of a Bayesian network for a legal case. In this paper, these techniques are combined to form a design method for constructing a Bayesian network based on narratives. This design method is evaluated by means of an extensive case study concerning the notorious Dutch case of the Anjum murders.

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Notes

  1. GeNIe 2.0 is available for free on genie.sis.pitt.edu

  2. Note that specifying numbers in the absence of information runs the risk of falsely suggesting that these exact numbers are known.

  3. www.projectgeredetwijfel.nl (in Dutch)

  4. GeNIe 2.0 is available for free on genie.sis.pitt.edu

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Acknowledgments

This work is part of the project “Designing and Understanding Forensic Bayesian Networks with Arguments and Scenarios” in the Forensic Science programme, financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). More information about the project: www.ai.rug.nl/~verheij/nwofs

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Charlotte S. Vlek & Bart Verheij

  2. Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Henry Prakken & Silja Renooij

  3. Faculty of Law, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Henry Prakken

  4. CodeX, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Bart Verheij

Authors
  1. Charlotte S. Vlek
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  2. Henry Prakken
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  3. Silja Renooij
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  4. Bart Verheij
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Charlotte S. Vlek.

Appendix

Appendix

See Figs. 18, 19, 20 and 21.

Fig. 18
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The first scenario

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Fig. 19
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The second scenario

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Fig. 20
figure 20

The merged scenarios. The nodes of the first scenario only are white, nodes of the second scenario only are dark grey, and nodes in both scenarios are light grey

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Fig. 21
figure 21

The full structure with the evidence. Nodes of the first scenario only are white, nodes of the second scenario are dark grey, and nodes in both scenarios are light grey

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Vlek, C.S., Prakken, H., Renooij, S. et al. Building Bayesian networks for legal evidence with narratives: a case study evaluation. Artif Intell Law 22, 375–421 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-014-9161-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-014-9161-7

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