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MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

innocenceproject.org

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Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#51

Post by justin66 »

caminante wrote: post #39
pkrotich wrote: post #35

What scares me about US legal system is; Elected prosectutors are motivated by high conviction rate for obvious reasons (re-election and politics of it all). Add the fact that their line of work requires competitive personalities and you become just but a number, especially if you don't have competent cousel. I'm not saying ALL public defendors are incompetent, but we see to many cases of ineffective representation w…

False positives are rare in the US [0]: estimated at only 1% of incarcerations according to the Innocence Project (mentioned in HN article) and go even lower depending on who does the analysis. Are you aware of legal systems in other countries with lower false positives? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_...

A 1% false positive conviction rate is not comforting.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#53

Post by giantg2 »

gnicholas wrote: post #38

So if it’s impossible to light a pool of gasoline with a match, what is being used in movies when this appears to happen?

A lot of times it looks like they're burning alcohol to me.

It's even more funny when they show them lighting jet fuel with a match or lighter.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#54

Post by caminante »

giantg2 wrote: post #48
caminante wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False positives are rare in the US [0]: estimated at only 1% of incarcerations according to the Innocence Project (mentioned in HN article) and go even lower depending on who does the analysis. Are you aware of legal systems in other countries with lower false positives? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_...

More like 2-10%. And that's only for the incarcerated . There are many more that take deals to avoid prison time and rotting in jail for 2 years just to get a trial, etc. https://thehighcourt.co/wrongful-convictions-statistics/ Edit: can't find the actual article. Child commenter goes into great detail about this being a rather solid range though.

Where is the 2-10% in the source document [0]? I couldn't find it in a brief glance.

[0] https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Exon...

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#55

Post by sanp »

caminante wrote: post #39
pkrotich wrote: post #35

What scares me about US legal system is; Elected prosectutors are motivated by high conviction rate for obvious reasons (re-election and politics of it all). Add the fact that their line of work requires competitive personalities and you become just but a number, especially if you don't have competent cousel. I'm not saying ALL public defendors are incompetent, but we see to many cases of ineffective representation w…

False positives are rare in the US [0]: estimated at only 1% of incarcerations according to the Innocence Project (mentioned in HN article) and go even lower depending on who does the analysis. Are you aware of legal systems in other countries with lower false positives? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_...

This doesn’t show what the false positive number is from African Americans or Latinos.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#56

Post by hammock »

woojoo666 wrote: post #12

What kind of compensation do these people typically get? I can't imagine what compensation would be enough for losing 35 years of your life, especially the years 18-53. There goes almost all dreams of becoming famous, meeting your soulmate, starting a family, etc.

Many municipalities have an online database of all the wrongful death settlements, etc that they (aka the taxpayer, split with e.g. the police pension fund) have paid or are current paying.

Once out of curiosity I googled the name of the officer who simply “took” my online stolen property report, and found out both they and their partner had multimillion dollar judgments against them

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#57

Post by tialaramex »

caminante wrote: post #46
polygamous_bat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If every time you enter the legal system and you have a 1% chance of being falsely convicted, that is a broken and dangerous system regardless of how other countries fare at that metric. Especially if you consider that certain underprivileged demographics are already at a higher risk of having more run-ins with the police regardless of their criminal state.

> that is a broken and dangerous system regardless of how other countries fare at that metric. No. It's on topic because the parent singled out the US, and I'm curious if other countries are taking procedures that could be adopted in the US to reduce false positives and ALSO false negatives.

Wait, why do you think it's necessary to also reduce false negatives?

Suppose there are five people who stole some candy, out of 100 people in the village.

I claim that a system A in which three of the actual thieves are successfully convicted, but the others escape is better than a system B in which four people are successfully convicted, three of them are thieves but one is innocent. You seem to disagree, insisting a better system must also reduce false negatives.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#58

Post by el_nahual »

caminante wrote: post #39
pkrotich wrote: post #35

What scares me about US legal system is; Elected prosectutors are motivated by high conviction rate for obvious reasons (re-election and politics of it all). Add the fact that their line of work requires competitive personalities and you become just but a number, especially if you don't have competent cousel. I'm not saying ALL public defendors are incompetent, but we see to many cases of ineffective representation w…

False positives are rare in the US [0]: estimated at only 1% of incarcerations according to the Innocence Project (mentioned in HN article) and go even lower depending on who does the analysis. Are you aware of legal systems in other countries with lower false positives? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_...

That number doesn't seem right to me so I followed the wikipedia citation. It cites "The Innocence Project", which actually says:

> the few studies that have been done estimate that between 2.3% and 5% of all prisoners in the U.S. are innocent (for context, if just 1% of all prisoners are innocent, that would mean that more than 20,000 innocent people are in prison).

https://innocenceproject.org/contact/#:~:text=How%20many%20i...).

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#59

Post by Retric »

caminante wrote: post #39
pkrotich wrote: post #35

What scares me about US legal system is; Elected prosectutors are motivated by high conviction rate for obvious reasons (re-election and politics of it all). Add the fact that their line of work requires competitive personalities and you become just but a number, especially if you don't have competent cousel. I'm not saying ALL public defendors are incompetent, but we see to many cases of ineffective representation w…

False positives are rare in the US [0]: estimated at only 1% of incarcerations according to the Innocence Project (mentioned in HN article) and go even lower depending on who does the analysis. Are you aware of legal systems in other countries with lower false positives? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_...

2% of people on death row get exonerated and that’s an underestimate due to the difficulty in proving innocence. Most crimes don’t see anything close to that level of review before or after conviction with death row reserved for the most clear cut cases.

So, most estimates suggest in the range of 2-10% of convictions are probably wrongful.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#60

Post by DannyBee »

giantg2 wrote: post #48
caminante wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False positives are rare in the US [0]: estimated at only 1% of incarcerations according to the Innocence Project (mentioned in HN article) and go even lower depending on who does the analysis. Are you aware of legal systems in other countries with lower false positives? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_...

More like 2-10%. And that's only for the incarcerated . There are many more that take deals to avoid prison time and rotting in jail for 2 years just to get a trial, etc. https://thehighcourt.co/wrongful-convictions-statistics/ Edit: can't find the actual article. Child commenter goes into great detail about this being a rather solid range though.

Both overall cite NRE data.

So may be better to go to the source (and the latest version). https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/NRE%...

is the 2021 National registry of exonerations annual report.

What you'll see, interestingly, is neither the 2021, nor 2019 report, estimate the prevalence of wrongful conviction directly.

In particular, the claim "According to the 2019 annual report by the National Registry of Exonerations, wrongful convictions statistics show that the percentage of wrongful convictions is somewhere between 2% and 10%. "

It does not say that. It offers no percent view on the rate of wrongful convictions. It only offers the direct number of exonerations, exonerations broken down by race, by crime type, etc. It points out lots of statistical things (exonerations are not evenly distributed by race, crime, etc)

Someone else, with some other (not obviously explained) methodology is using that to calculate wrongful conviction rates.

That said, roughly all sources i can find are within the 2-12% rate bound (IE i see a number saying 3-6%, a number saying 1%, a number saying 12-13%).

The only truly easily found study (IE pops up immediately on google search) is federal: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/251115.pdf

The DOJ funded the urban justice institute to figure this out back in 2017, and the rate they came up with was also ~11%.

In there, they point to/compare with previous studies on DNA evidence that suggest a rate of 12.5%

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