  Astrophysical polarization measurements in the soft gamma-ray band are
becoming more feasible as detectors with high position and energy resolution
are deployed. Previous work has shown that the minimum detectable polarization
(MDP) of an ideal Compton polarimeter can be improved by $\sim 21\%$ when an
unbinned, maximum likelihood method is used instead of the standard approach of
fitting a sinusoid to a histogram of azimuthal scattering angles. Here we
outline a procedure for implementing this maximum likelihood approach for real,
non-ideal polarimeters. As an example, we use the recent observation of GRB
160530A with the Compton Spectrometer and Imager. We find that the MDP for this
observation is reduced by $20\%$ when the maximum likelihood method is used
instead of the standard method.
