Morendil comments on You Be the Jury: Survey on a Current Event - Less Wrong

31 Post author: komponisto 09 December 2009 04:25AM

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Comment author: Morendil 10 December 2009 03:27:25PM *  1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: jimmy 10 December 2009 07:35:08PM 0 points [-]

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.