Source: Foucault's Discipline and Punish
As much as I'm not on board with "confession through torture", I wonder if non-boolean guilt could help sort out some of the dumber quirks of our legal system. As is we just have "innocent" and "guilty" (which is either 51% chance of guilt in civil cases, or 'beyond reasonable doubt' in criminal ones).
But we're clearly fumbling around for new values. The Supreme Court decision about retrials (that "probably would have been found innocent at original trial" is not enough to justify a retrial) clearly makes more sense in terms of real-valued guilt - we can then set some actual standard for retrial, which is different from the standard for conviction. Perhaps you get convicted at 90% guilty in criminal cases, but don't get to open a retrial unless your estimate drops to 70% guilty.
Now I'm fascinated. What would real-valued guilt look like in a modern system?