The aims of this article are twofold: firstly, to show the inconsistency between these theses and secondly, independent of this inconsistency, Laudan's argument is unacceptable regarding the number of guilty defendant's acquittals. At the same time, Laudan holds that BARD produces a large number of guilty defendant's acquittals due to its excessive demand for evidence. His main contention is that the BARD formula converts evidential support into subjective confidence, and is therefore not a genuine standard of proof. Professor Larry Laudan has criticized this requirement for several reasons. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt (BARD) is one of the most fundamental requirements of American criminal law and other legal systems. The resulting balance supports a standard arguably in the ballpark of the customary understanding of BARD: a standard requiring that the fact finder have a high, though not maximally high, degree of confidence that the defendant is guilty. In this paper, I offer a new retributive justification that supports excluding the instrumental benefits of punishment from the balance that sets the standard. Meanwhile, consequentialist arguments plausibly support a substantially lower standard - in some cases so low as to undermine the idea that punishment is what is at stake. A number of non-consequentialist justifications that aim to support an even higher standard have been offered all are morally unsound. Strikingly, no good reason has yet been offered in defense of using that standard. It is customary to describe it, when putting a number on it, as requiring that the fact finder be at least 90% certain, after considering the evidence, that the defendant is guilty. The standard of proof in criminal trials in many liberal democracies is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the BARD standard.
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