Reasonable Doubt: A Particular Conception

Has the BARD judgment a merely probabilistic character? BARD says that defendant’s guilt can be affirmed also in presence of doubts, provided that they are not reasonable, and not able to prevent the judge from nourishing rationally justified beliefs and sponging off the “knowledge” of the facts. For some people BARD has the function to indicate the degree of probability of guilt required to pass a conviction. According to supporters of probabilistic conception of the reasonable doubt (CPRD), in order to declare the accused person guilty it is not enough to consider the hypothesis affirming criminal responsibility more probable than the opposing hypothesis, as it occurs in civil proceedings . It is necessary that the acquired proofs provide a very high level of positive probability, very close to certainty. It is quite hard to fill such criterion with contents, to define in a more precise way the substantiating standard coinciding with “very high probability” of the guilt. Certainly the indefiniteness of the regulatory reference parameter, the reasonable or not reasonable character of the doubt is not of help; It is not by chance that somebody defined the syntagm “reasonable doubt” as auto-definable; the attempts to explain its content “generally are not able to make clearer the meaning to the jury.”