Q5 - Attorneys for a criminal defendant

[bigtree65]

I was torn between A and E on this one because I couldn't understand how I'm supposed to interpret the last sentence of the stimulus. "The government replied that there is no evidence that would even tend to support the defendant in the case." On the one hand it sounds like the government is simply stating that there is no evidence and ignoring the attorneys' claims. But on the other hand the words "would" and "tend" and "even" make it sound like the government is saying that there is no type of evidence that could possibly support this defendant and the attorneys' claims are irrelevant. Can someone please help me understand how to not make a stupid mistake like this again? I'm very confused on this one.

[ohthatpatrick]

I definitely see the potential ambiguity you're looking at there.

The problem with the interpretation that would favor (E), I think, is that it offends common sense (and believe it or not,
the test does not want you to do that --- if you read the paragraph of instructions at the beginning of the Logical Reasoning section, you'll see what I mean).

By "offends common sense" I mean that it seems impossible that there could be a defendant for whom "no possible type of evidence could even theoretically be supporting".

That would have to mean that a defendant was guilty by pure definition. What alleged crime/offense/infraction could be impervious to any evidence that suggests innocence?

To get extra nit-picky, in order for the government to really be saying "there is conceptually no such thing as evidence that would support this defendant", we would either need a word like "conceptually" or "there is no such thing as evidence that would support", or we would need the sentence to encompass more than the present tense.

For example, "there is not, there was not, there will not, and there never could be evidence that would even tend to support this defendant."

As written, the government is strictly saying that there does not presently exist evidence that helps this defendant.

As (A) suggests, that leaves open the possibility that there DID exist evidence before the govt. destroyed it.

And with this present-tense only interpretation, (E) is incorrect to say that, if true, it disproves that the government destroyed evidence.

I gathered that you were saying, "if there's no such thing as the logical category of evidence that would support this defendant, then it would be impossible for the government to have destroyed something that logically could not exist."

But it would be a big stretch of common sense to interpret the last sentence in the argument that way.

This sounds a lot like the famous Clinton ambiguity of "it depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."

Hope this helped. Keep up the good work!