Posted on 04/29/2014 8:38:55 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
At least 4.1% of all defendants sentenced to death in the US in the modern era are innocent, according to the first major study to attempt to calculate how often states get it wrong in their wielding of the ultimate punishment.
A team of legal experts and statisticians from Michigan and Pennsylvania used the latest statistical techniques to produce a peer-reviewed estimate of the “dark figure” that lies behind the death penalty – how many of the more than 8,000 men and women who have been put on death row since the 1970s were falsely convicted.
The team arrived at a deliberately conservative figure that lays bare the extent of possible miscarriages of justice, suggesting that the innocence of more than 200 prisoners still in the system may never be recognised
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
If the number is that easy to fudge -- then there is no reason to take their "study" seriously.
So? 100% of aborted babies are innocent too, yet we don’t stop executing them.
I’d like to know what it is for this century. Lumping in the years all the way back to the 70’s is like lumping auto accident death statistics that far back, or average gas mileage.
If they know they’re innocent, then why not let them lose?
Here we go again.
Always look at WHO is conducting these “studies” for all the information you need about their veracity.
Hmmmm, “survival analysis”...”sensitivity analysis”...danger, danger, lib arts BS detector is going off full tilt.
When you want statistical analysis done correctly, you get quantum physics which agrees with actual experiments to one part in millions.
When you want statistical analysis done in a questionable manner, you get this article.
I’m not saying it’s not true, but I’d say (using survival and sensitivity analysis, of course) there’s around a 99% probability that it’s pure bull Obamastuff.
(This is NOT to state there is not error in the legal process. It IS stating that the analysis done in this case is most probably amateurish, at least.)
Exactly.
But by "innocent," be sure that this simply means that a lawyer forgot to cross a "T" in some obscure affidavit.
Always follow the money trail
No problem.
Go ahead and execute the other 96% and we’ll call it even.
Six sigma process control gets 95.5% predictability. It looks like they simply used this characteristic of a classic bell curve.
So are innocent and not proven guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt high standard which we have in place.
The last "innocent" media celebrity who was actually executed was a guy named Roger Keith Coleman">Roger Keith Coleman back in 1992.
Most of us don't remember how that turned out because the DNA evidence tested in 2006 proved that the State of Virginia got it right when they strapped him into the electric chair and turned on the switch 14 years earlier.
Lesson to rapist/murders: If you rape someone, don't murder them. If you do it anyway, then be sure to remove every trace of semen, hair and body contact.
Righto. "Innocent" in this context generally means "improperly convicted," not actually, factually innocent of the crime in question.
More importantly, I would suggest that "innocent" in this should mean "not deserving of the penalty." Some significant percentage of those actually innocent of the crime for which they were convicted had committed others, often many others, they got away with. I believe this is commonly known as "poetic justice."
However, I would like to point out a caveat. A great many threads on FR recently have been about police and prosecutor corruption and malpractice. Many of FR seem to agree that these institutions are out of control.
In which case it would be logical to expect the wrongly convicted number to be considerably higher than 4%.
You can't claim that the cops and DAs are all crooked, and at the same time that (almost) everybody in jail was properly convicted.
The number of people being freed by DNA evidence after serving years if not decades in prison is testament to our imperfect justice system. Eventually DNA will be used to exonerate someone who had been executed for a crime. It's only a matter of time.
I support the death penalty but believe it should only be used when there was an abundance of physical evidence linking a convict to the crime.
I don't know the exact numbers but the Innocence Project vets cases very carefully and even then, the majority of the cases they take wind up confirming guilty verdicts.
And 100% of statistics from liberal think tanks are drek.
There is a difference between innocence and sentences being thrown out.
I am for the death penalty in theory but in practice, there are too many errors, too many incompetent or corrupt people working in labs, prosecution, or police forces. I don’t trust the government. I don’t trust the imbalance of power. I don’t trust prosecutors having all the threats they do, including capital charges, to pressure defendants to plead guilty.
NY and NJ have recently seen a few cases where people convicted of murder were proved innocent, not just released. There’s no death penalty - NJ in law and NY in practice.
Texas has had a few appalling cases recently - a man convicted of murdering his wife because police and prosecutors overlooked and did not disclose exculpatory evidence. He was released after twenty years when the real murderer was found. Then there is the man executed for committing arson that killed his three little girls - innocence not proven but it WAS proven that the “accelerant patterns” could be recreated without accelerant and that the fire investigator had no real scientific training in recognizing arson.
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