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 ...
“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..”
A ‘peer reviewed estimate’, likely with an accuracy of +- 4%.
In case anyone on FR can’t tell, this is statistical nonsense. The gibberish in this study is based on nothing at all but amateurish gimmicks.
67.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
I worked in the PA DOC and tha thas always been the drum beat. It is alway the poor convict and to hell with those they killed and their families.
Innocent (meaning they didn’t do it) or not guilty (meaning you don’t believe it was satisfactorily proven that they did it)?
Justice delayed is not justice denied for the 142 death row inmates exonerated as of Dec. 26, 2012. That number includes 12 in Texas. A rush to execution increases the likelihood of an innocent person being put to death. I am pro-life, meaning I am against abortion and against the death penalty. I have no problem with sentencing people to life without parole for heinous crimes, but most reasonable people would agree that innocent people have been executed. Fortunately, we now have the forensic technology that can more definitively determine innocence or guilt.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Mark Twain
Indeed - if they can count them, they know who they are.
I don’t believe this assertion in the least. There’s frankly no way to know.
Liberals would assert that it would be far better to let a thousand guilty murderers free than to convict and execute on innocent person.
The argument, however, is typical of liberal thought - ignoring the cost of such an action.
What of the future victims of the guilty that they would release in order to assure that the one innocent person wasn’t wrongfully punished?
They are essentially conviction those people, the innocent future victims, to death in order to assuage their own consciences.
The fact is that no one that has been executed has been proven innocent of the crime they were convicted.
Forensic DNA testing didn't begin to have reliability or wide use until after 2000.
This study is garbage, and I'm not an advocate of the death penalty.
It’s disgraceful that a prestigious journal like PNAS published this “study” which is purely speculative. As The Guardian article correctly states, the research “ ... does not solve perhaps the greatest single riddle of the death penalty: how many innocent people have actually been put to death in modern times.” The Guardian article also reports a stupid quote from Richard Dieter stating “ ... every time we have an execution, there is a risk of executing an innocent person. The risk may be small, but it’s unacceptable”. This is simply an argument for no executions, ever.
When I worked in corrections, 100% were innocent.... Just ask them!
Are they counting Mumia? Cause if they are, this study is garbage.
Seriously, isn’t the Guardian a pretty left wing paper? There used to be a figure that claimed that 23 innocent people in the 20th century had been executed by the US justice system who were “innocent.” But I think that they were counting Bruno Hauptmann, for example.
I’m not minimizing this problem, it’s just that with modern forensic techniques, were are less likely than at any other time to get the wrong person. And it isn’t as if the appeals process isn’t long enough.
You true crime buff...
The 4.1% 'innocent' figure presumes that all 'once-but-no-longer-death-sentenced' convicts continuously appealled their convictions until their deaths from something other than state-sponsored execution, and that some of them would, eventually, be exonerated - and are then counted as an exonerated defendant sentenced to death.
The argument, however, is typical of liberal thought - ignoring the cost of such an action.
What of the future victims of the guilty
So you'd prefer a system that erred on the side of public safety even if this meant sending an innocent person to prison once in a while?
How many innocent people can you name who were executed in the past century in the United States? I don’t mean an armed robber who shot the victim in a non-lethal location but was later determined not to have fired the fatal shot, or a robber who claims to have gathered the money while his partner fired the fatal shot, I mean genuinely wasn’t part of the overall crime innocent people executed?
If it’s genuine innocence, that is a problem. If it’s a criminal who admits to having been part of the crime but claims not to have fired the fatal shot, I have trouble caring about the alleged “error”. BTW, if I was convicted of a crime I didn’t commit, I’d rather get a death sentence - that dramatically improves the odds of someone noticing the error that wrongly sent me to prison.
Answering your exact phrasing, yes, I would.
I would rather an innocent person went to prison "once in a while", than have numerous violent criminals on the streets killing innocent people more frequently than "once in a while".
> A team of legal experts and statisticians from Michigan and Pennsylvania used the latest statistical techniques to produce a peer-reviewed estimate...
IOW, readers of An Agenda-Driven Life got together, spun the dial on the Life game board, and came up with some numbers, which aren’t based on anything real, then their fellow agenda-pushers — their peers — reviewed it.
Carry out all the executions.
Easy to say if you or one of your loved ones isn’t that person. I’m not disagreeing, just saying its a tough one. To me, when it comes down to it, this is the only valid argument against the death penalty.
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