People v. Collins was a 1968 American robbery trial in California noted for its misuse of probability and as an example of the prosecutor's fallacy.
Trial
After a mathematics instructor testified about the multiplication rule for probability, though ignoring conditional probability, the prosecutor invited the jury to consider the probability that the accused (who fit a witness's description of a black male with a beard and mustache and a Caucasian female with a blond ponytail, fleeing in a yellow car) were not the robbers, suggesting that they estimated the probabilities as:
{|
|Black man with beard
|1 in 10
|-
|Man with mustache
|1 in 4
|-
|White woman with pony tail
|1 in 10
|-
|White woman with blond hair
|1 in 3
|-
|Yellow motor car
|1 in 10
|-
|Interracial couple in car
|1 in 1,000
|-
|}
The jury returned a guilty verdict.
The court noted that the correct statistical inference would be the probability that no other couple who could have committed the robbery had the same traits as the defendants given that at least one couple had the identified traits. The court noted, in an appendix to its decision, that using this correct statistical inference, even if the prosecutor's statistics were all correct and independent as he assumed, the probability that the defendants were innocent would be over 40%.
The court asserted that mathematics, "...while assisting the trier of fact in the search of truth, must not cast a spell over him."