Truth III

 

Battle Hymn of the Republic

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword
His Truth is marching on

Are you in favor of the Truth?

There seems to be a fixation that the Truth is about Dominance, while nothing could be further from the…doh….Truth. The Truth is about CERTAINTY, not DOMINANCE. A majority of the Supreme Court, a 5-4 decision, might be the truth, or it might merely be dominance. So how do we get it get to certainty?

The current judicial system provides the  answer. A uniramous jury has a certainty of 99.97%. That is because a unanimous jury verdict of guilty is only 1 of 4096 outcomes. (A unanimous verdict of NOT guilty is also only one of of 4096 outcomes.)  That jury verdict can not be completely certain due to statistics. Also that jury verdict might be only a false positive, which is why there are appeals, if: the evidence presented to the jury is false; the jury is biased and can not fairly judge the evidence; or there has been jury tampering. A criminal jury verdict of 7-5 is not only hung, a mistrial, it could only reflect dominance, not certainty.

Any verdict should be about Certainty, not Dominance. That is why Trial by Combat, which was never a part of Roman Law, the Law of Moses, the Code of Hammurabi, etc., is considered to be barbaric and has been all but eliminated. But requiring unanimity gives tremendous power to a single holdout. That holdout may require that their position, the lowest common denominator, be accepted by the group. But there is a way to get certainty, not dominance without requiring unanimity. Statistics provides an answer to this in the square root of the variance; and the Z-score, the justices in the dominant decision divided by the mean of those justices, expressed as a percentile.

A normal distribution follows the 68/95/99 rule. This means that 68% of the outcomes are found between the mean plus 1 Standard Deviation, the square root of the variance; 95% of the outcomes are found between the mean plus 2 Standard Deviations; and 99% of the values are found between the mean plus 3 Standard Deviations. A verdict from a single judge might be dominance or might be certainty. A normal distribution might require an infinite number of justices but there can not be an infinite number of justices making a decision. Assuming a normal distribution, 68% of the bench, would seem to be the desirable number of the justices to determine certainty rather than dominance. For a 9 justice Supreme Court, this would mean that no decision would be considered certain unless it had 68% of the Court. But 68% of 9 is 6.12 which, because justices are not fractions, would require a 7-2 decision, to have a certainty above 68%. 68% of ten justices, adding a justice to the current court, would be 6.8 which would also round to 7 justices. Thus to reflect certainty, rather than dominance, it is suggested that decisions should require 7 of 9 justices, include 94.0% of the outcomes; or 7 of 10 justices, include 91.9% of the outcomes. If one justice is removed from the Supreme Court, the mean would be 4, the median would be 4, but the mode would be evenly split between 3 AND 4. A dominant vote would require a 5-3 decision, which includes 89.4% of the outcomes, and that is its certainty. Or if two justices are removed from the current court so that there are seven justices, then the mean is 3.5, the median is 3.5, but the mode is 4. A 4-3 vote is not only dominant, but it also has a Z-score of 4/3.5. That reflects a certainty of  87.3%

If, politically, it would be difficult to remove justices from SCOTUS, it is recommended that a justice be added to SCOTUS and, that to reflect certainty, its decisions require 7 of the 10 justices on SCOTUS. It is also noted that a 10-member court could be split, 5-5 which would never reflect dominance. A 6-4 vote might merely reflect dominance, not  certainty.