If anything, I would say that the porn is evidence against Sollecito’s guilt. After all, considering how common “black guy rapes white girl” porn is, if that’s something he was interested in seeing and his porn viewing is indicative of his interests, then it would be more reasonable to expect him to have it than not.
Anyway, the idea that the porn could be not evidence, but something to show a plausible scenario, is simply nonsense. The prior probability for Sollecito’s guilt reflects all possible scenarios in which Sollecito could have been involved, and is based on our best available knowledge of how often people in his circumstances commit the sort of crime attributed to him. Any meaningful information must either show that our prior was inappropriate (people in Sollecito’s reference class commit this sort of crime more often than we thought) or show that Sollecito in particular was more likely to have committed this particular crime. Brazil disavowed its relevance in the latter respect, and it’s obviously not relevant in the former.
If anything, I would say that the porn is evidence against Sollecito’s guilt. After all, considering how common “black guy rapes white girl” porn is, if that’s something he was interested in seeing and his porn viewing is indicative of his interests, then it would be more reasonable to expect him to have it than not.
Anyway, the idea that the porn could be not evidence, but something to show a plausible scenario, is simply nonsense. The prior probability for Sollecito’s guilt reflects all possible scenarios in which Sollecito could have been involved, and is based on our best available knowledge of how often people in his circumstances commit the sort of crime attributed to him. Any meaningful information must either show that our prior was inappropriate (people in Sollecito’s reference class commit this sort of crime more often than we thought) or show that Sollecito in particular was more likely to have committed this particular crime. Brazil disavowed its relevance in the latter respect, and it’s obviously not relevant in the former.