n article by Finklestein and Fairley which advocated greater use of probability type evidence at trial. In that article, Finklestein and Fairley pose the following hypothetical. A woman is found dead, the victim of a knife attack. Her boy friend, who is known to have struck her on other occasions and with whom the deceased had a violent quarrel the night before her body was found, is indicted for her murder. Entered into evidence is a knife which contains on its handle a right hand palm print similar to the defendant's. The prosecution wishes to introduce testimony of a qualified statistical expert which shows (based on certain assumptions) that only about one in a thousand individuals would leave such a palm print. Should the statistical evidence be admissible at trial? Finklestein and Fairley say the answer to that question is yes because such evidence is relevant to the issue of whether the palm print on the knife belongs to the defendant and because, taken together with other evidence, it may assist the jury in arriving at a rational verdict as to the defendant's guilt or innocence of the crime. Tribe disagrees
stating that "the costs of attempting to integrate mathematics into the factfinding process of a legal trial outweigh their benefits."
In arriving at this conclusion, Tribe opposes the use of such evidence in trials because: (1) it is either irrelevant, invalid as a technical matter or lacks reliability; and (2) even if such evidence were helpful in the search for truth, its use would somehow undermine the integrity of the legal process itself.
Before getting into the details, merits and flaws of Tribe's reasoning, it should be said that a great deal of confusion exists because of his article and in much of the later literature on this subject concerning the basic purposes of trials in the Anglo-Saxon system of justice. Saks and Kidd offer a sensible definition of a trial --"a social invention for deciding be...