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Comment by yskchu | Hacker News Reader

High conviction rate is not something unique to China - Canada and Japan are also at 97% and 99% respectively

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate

The difference is the conviction rate in China is over 10 times higher than that at 99.9% [1,2] and thought to be driven by political interference/corruption rather than only targeting high yield cases. Bear in mind the context of china’s top court rejecting the notion of an independent judiciary [3], it is clear there is a difference between a high conviction rate in these countries and China.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/1... [2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/121932... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/26/chinas-top-cou...

>The difference is the conviction rate in China is over 10 times higher

Actually, it's not over 10 times higher; I double checked, Japan's is also 99.9% and has been for some time.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_Jap...

Statistics from Wikipedia link: http://hakusyo1.moj.go.jp/en/61/image/image/h002003001001h.j...

If you just take guilty/not guilty, the % is actually 99.98% in Japan (e.g. 2011, 77 Not Guilty, 432,050 Guilty)

That’s interesting, thanks for the correction. That’s actually also concerning. Either they are are prosecuting enough people, and letting criminals go free, or the legal system is broken (or perhaps a huge cultural difference I’m missing). What is the point in hiring a defence lawyer if the chance of successful defence is so low? I can’t think of any test in my area of expertise (medicine) that has such a high success rate, meaning that false positives must be much too high for comfort.

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