Speaking Stats to Justice: Expert Testimony in a Guatemalan Human Rights Trial Based on Statistical Sampling, Analysis

• Activity Number: 154
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Monday, July 30, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): Daniel Guzman*+
• Companies: Benetech
• Keywords: Guatemala ; sampling ; Human Rights

Abstract

In October 2010, I testified as an expert witness in a legal case that set a historic precedent for human rights in Guatemala. The Guatemalan Attorney General's Office summoned me to present evidence in the trial of two former Guatemalan National Police agents accused of forcibly disappearing 26-year-old student and union leader Edgar Fernando García. García disappeared in 1984 after being detained by police on his way to work one morning.

My testimony to the court was based on my analysis of random samples drawn from the millions of documents in the Guatemalan National Police Archive. The Archive was found by chance in an explosives storehouse in 2005 and held what archivists estimate to be 8 kilometers, or approximately 80 million sheets of paper. Many of the police documents were created during the country's internal armed conflict from 1960 to 1996 during which tens of thousands of Guatemalans disappeared. After four years of intensely analyzing the archive documents, I stood before three judges to defend my statistical findings, which supported the prosecutor's case against the police officers. Statistical data is very seldom used as evidence in court cases in Guatemala.