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jimmy comments on You Be the Jury: Survey on a Current Event - Less Wrong
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Before or after conditioning on the rest of the available information?
If before, there's gotta be statistics out there. What fraction of people charged plead guilty? What fraction that plead not guilty are convicted?
What fraction of convicts are eventually proven innocent?
The first site below suggests US wrongful conviction rates range from .5 percent to 10 percent. It cites for the lower rate a source who I think is the author of the next URL:
http://www.caught.net/innoc.htm
http://www.abanet.org/crimjust/spring2003/conviction.html
I would be very surprised if Italy's legal system turned out to have a significantly worse rate.
"Convicts eventually proven innocent" is, sadly, bound to be a lower fraction than wrongful conviction rate - i.e. you get wrongful conviction rates by extrapolating one way or another from attested cases.
Thanks for the link. I get that "Convicts eventually proven innocent" is most likely a lower bound (probably not too many guilty ones later exonerated?), but I figured I'd have to work from there to get a crude guess.
On one hand, even 10% isn't all that bad in an absolute sense- most of the deterrent is being had with not too much additional waste. On the other, that means that our trial and jury system is probably worse than I thought, if it's true that "most" people charged with a crime plead guilty.
I'll look up the statistics and report back in a couple days.