The case represents one of the few instances where an appellate court considered whether an affirmative defense of duress should be allowed to incorporate evidence of battered person syndrome. The defendant, convicted of conspiring with her boyfriend to extort money from a doctor, testified that her boyfriend coerced her participation through his physically and emotionally abusive behavior. He also pretended to be an FBI agent which allowed the defendant to argue she did not feel reasonably safe in reporting the extortion scheme. Also of note, the case had an unusual procedure history wherein a three-judge panel reversed its prior judgment and the final split opinion was authored by Judge (now Justice) Brett Kavanaugh.

As a number of modern sexual misconduct cases demonstrate, often there are multiple charges against a single individual under circumstances in which the proof of an individual charge may fall short of the required standard of proof, but in which it is clear – overwhelmingly, or beyond a reasonable doubt – that at least one of the charges is true, even if we cannot be sure which one. Building on earlier work by myself and Richard Zeckhauser, by Alon Harel and Ariel Porat, and by Ariel Porat and Eric Posner, among others, this paper, prepared for the World Congress on Evidential Reasoning at the University of Girona, offers a sympathetic examination of sanction imposition – inside and outside formal legal proceedings – on the basis of aggregate probabilities, and addresses a series of common objections. And the paper suggests that the greatest value of aggregating low (or lower) probability charges may be greatest outside the official judicial process. It also hints, albeit inconclusively, at the larger question of why the law focuses on acts when it is imposing sanctions rather than focusing on the actors who may have committed those acts.