OK bear with me for second on this one....
I was just reading the other day about "Pitchf/x", a type of technology that can accurately track whether a pitch in baseball is a ball or a strike.
A couple of analysts went over 6 years of baseball data.
It turns out that umpires are wrong about balls & strikes about 14% of the time. What they call a "ball" is really a "strike" about 13% of the time, and what they call a "strike" is really a "ball" about 15% of the time. Here is the article.
That's at the major league level.
Umpires have to work their way up to the major leagues, just as players do. By the time an umpire gets to the major leagues, he's umpired in hundreds or thousands of games, and has made 10's or 100;s of thousands of ball/strike calls.
The definition of a "ball" or "strike" is quite simple. Major league umpires are the best of the best, with years or decades of experience.
And they still get it wrong 14% of the time.
Jehovah's Witness elders have at most a few hours training over the course of their lifetime on "handling judicial cases". They get 40 or 50 pages of "training material" in their elder book. They will sit on anywhere from 0 to maybe a dozen judicial committees in any given year. The most experienced might sit on a hundred or so over the period of his elder-career.
And they are supposed to judge - not whether a ball passes between points A, B, C, and D - no, they are to judge the "sincerity" of someone's repentance - is it "commensurate with the level of wrongdoing". And they base that judgement on a few minutes of tearful, emotionally charged answers to probing questions by a fearful "wrongdoer".
How often do they get it wrong?
30 or so years ago, the WT published that about 40,000 per year were being disfellowshipped in congregations annually.
There are more than twice as many JWs now as then, It seems reasonable to conclude that there are at least 100,000 DF'ed per year now.
Based on my observations, most judicial cases do not end up in a DF. So there are quite likely several hundred thousand JW judicial cases per year.
How often do the elders get it wrong?
If they were as polished, professional, and well-trained as MLB umpires, there would be 10's of thousands of wrongful DFings each year, hundreds of thousands over the past decade.
If they were as well-trained as MLB umpires. Not if they were, say, bumbling uneducated, callous, and uncaring morons who view themselves as wild-west sheriffs cleaning up God's town.
Even for the elders who do sincerely try to "get it right" - how often do they get it wrong?
Just something for lurkers, apologists, etc. who read articles like "Why Disfellowshipping is a Loving Provision" to think about.