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Comment by pkrotich | Hacker News Reader

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 when the accused cannot afford a high powered attorney.

Yes - you should be scared of ordinary prosectutors in suits doing their "best" job more than a gang member for example! They want are motivated to win at all cost... short of obviously illegal ways.

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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...).

The 1% actually cites the estimation method (extrapolation from DNA exonerations). The higher 2.3-5% doesn’t. What studies are those?

https://innocenceproject.org/how-many-innocent-people-are-in...

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=996629 , is the 2.3%

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228207991_Innocents... is the 5%.

And for context: both of those numbers are based on studying proven false convictions of people given the death penalty, which of course is a) supposed to have a high bar of evidence to convict in the first place and b) does have an incredibly high bar of both evidence and legal argument to be proven innocent after conviction. Since the majority of people convicted of crimes in the USA didn't even go to trial, it is realistically impossible that this number applies to all people in prison - the percentage of false overall convictions must be higher than the percentage of people who were sentenced to death and then proved themselves innocent, given the different pressures and levels of scrutiny on different crimes.

(cite for not going to trial: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...)

Whoops – https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=931454 is a better source for the second one.

Note that the false positive rate for convictions won't necessarily match the percentage of prisoners who are innocent. The latter depends on both the rate of false conviction and the distribution of sentence lengths.

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.

> If every time you enter the legal system and you have a 1% chance of being falsely convicted

I agree with you that 1% is a high number in this context, but I don't think the math works for what you're saying here.

If 1 out of 100 convictions are of innocent people, that doesn't mean that 1 out of 100 innocent people put on trial are going to get convicted. That rate could be higher or lower than 1% because it depends how many innocent people are rightfully judged innocent.

Hypothetically, a court system that always returns a guilty verdict could have a 1% false conviction rate if 99% of people put on trial are actually guilty. But the rate of wrongful conviction for an innocent person entering this system would be 100%.

The United State's conviction rate is more than 75% -- You are assuming a fair outcome.

The innocent person has a 75% change of being convicted. A plea deal of the innocent isn't counted if it avoids jail time.

Better to deal with the cost and hassle of parole than being prisoner where you are legally on the same level as a slave.

> The innocent person has a 75% change of being convicted.

If the conviction rate is 75%, and the percent of convictions that are innocent is 5%, wouldn't that make an innocent's conviction chance at most 30%?

Edit: I'm silly. It's at least 30%. If some of the unconvicted are guilty, the denominator of innocents is smaller.

Most convictions aren’t via trial but via plea bargains. It’s fair to assume that innocent people are less likely to take a plea bargain than guilty people, so the chances of getting falsely convicted could be quite high for an innocent person going to trial.

> 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.

Ben Franklin:

> That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.

This builds upon an idea espoused by Voltaire, I believe.

Western philosophical/political systems have long held the idea that false negatives are a worthwhile cost to avoid any false positives.

> a system B in which four people are successfully convicted, three of them are thieves but one is innocent.

You might need to re-phrase your hypothetical: "five people [...] stole some candy candy", now you have three getting convicted, a new person is innocent, but charged, and what happened to the 5th person?

Regardless, you're skipping a step to argue values about how many people should be incarcerated, etc. False negatives matter because just like you don't want innocent people being locked up for stealing candy (or serious crimes), you ALSO don't want a high number of murderers freed into the streets!

> what happened to the 5th person?

They weren't convicted. I feel like the fact you weren't able to figure that out suggests I need to work through this example a little more slowly in the hope you can follow:

In the village of Example there are one hundred people, that's too many for me to name so I'm just going to number them E00 through to E99.

It so happens five of these people have stolen some candy, with our god view of the world we happen to know that it's E09, E14, E43, E44 and E90, but this information is not available to the other Example villagers or to a prosecutor, judge etc regardless of whether they live in Example. We have this god view, they do not. No real world prosecutors know for sure who committed which crimes and in many cases it's even unclear whether a crime was committed.

In system A, three people are convicted, and they are, let's say E14, E44 and E90, they are actually all thieves.

But in system B, four people are convicted, they're E09, E20, E43 and E90. Unfortunately E20 wasn't a candy thief, we know that with our god view.

I claim that system A is better than system B. Your claim was that system A isn't better because, apparently you feel that a better system must catch more of the thieves, and you've offered no argument for that beyond that you don't seem to see a difference between "more" and "not less".

Hold up...

> apparently you feel that a better system must catch more of the thieves, and you've offered no argument for that beyond that you don't seem to see a difference between "more" and "not less"

Where did I say or imply that.

I asked if other countries were doing things that could [X=reduce false positives] and [Y=reduce false negatives]. That's not presenting an argument. If there are ways to reduce false positives without necessarily reducing false negatives, I didn't ask for those, though, it'd be interesting for discussion.

If you don't care about reducing false negatives, then the ideal policy is simply to abolish prisons because that results in zero falsely imprisoned people.

They said they don't think it's essential to reduce false negatives, presumably from current levels. That's quite different than your reducto ad absurdum.

Well, GP/"they" didn't do a good job being clear.

They laid out two scenarios with 5 people stealing candy.

A. 0% false positive; 40% false negative

B. 20% false positive; 20% false negative (or maybe 4 people convicted with 1 innocent.)

Either way, the false negative % decreased, and it seemed like the point was that they viewed A as morally superior (at the expense of higher false negatives).

Overall, sure. You don't have to necessarily decrease the false negative rate, however, it's something that ideally doesn't go up, all else equal.

The actual source mentions the 1% being 'conservative'. Considering the Duluth model rules in many DV cases and there is an obvious bias towards not admitting false positives, I'd be surprised if that conservative measure was a maximum.

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%

Good catch

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...

Looks like they're referencing the LA Times but I can't find the actual article.

I see the stat referenced in an LA Times OpEd [0] by the fiction author, John Grisham, but hit a dead end.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-grisham-wrongful...

Interesting that other places would cite an OpEd. Seems like the other commenter has more indepth details than the OpEd.

Does that 1% include the number of people who accepted a plea deal, or only the number of wrongful convictions after a case has gone to trial?

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.

> due to the difficulty in proving innocence.

Remember: the person started out in a position of presumed innocence, and were found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I would expect it to be hard to prove innocence after enough evidence was provided to prove guilt.

Note: I am not saying the system always operates according to principles - that's why those 2% get exonerated. I just wouldn't expect the real number of falsely convicted to be much (if any) higher.

Perhaps I phrased it poorly. The standard for proving innocence is raised above a “Preponderance of the evidence” to “Clear and convincing evidence.”

That’s a high standard which if lowered would obviously see more innocent people set free. But we shouldn’t assume there is actually any evidence proving innocence, after all before DNA testing many people who would currently be set free where killed. At best we can estimate who would be set free if we could actually view the past.

If beyond a reasonable doubt is required to convict someone, shouldn't we overturn the conviction as soon as reasonable doubt is introduced? Why would it be desirable that we uphold a conviction that shouldn't have been handed down in the first place if the information was discovered before instead of after the verdict?

Notwithstanding the other replies to your comment estimating as high as 5%, 1% struck me as shockingly high.

Interesting that those are the numbers.

"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved."

Ben Franklin https://www.bartleby.com/73/953.html

A 1% false positive conviction rate is not comforting.

1% false positive for criminal conviction is horrifically bad and does not meet with the plain English “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, IMO.

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

Historically, this number would be just really depressing.

If police brutality numbers are higher against black and brown persons, I’d assume the false positive number for convictions is awful especially in the Southern US.

Bias against the poor and minorities isn’t limited to police but extends to juries, judges and prosecutors sadly.

Most public defenders are competent at their job.

Unfortunately, their job is to minimize the court's time spent spent dealing with their clients.

> Unfortunately, their job is to minimize the court's time spent spent dealing with their clients.

I think this is the unfortunate reality of them being obligated to take cases even if they don't really have enough defenders. This is an interesting read [1].

The TL;DR of that link is in Montana the head of the public defender's office was held in contempt and fined for refusing too many cases because they don't have the staffing. I don't know what the judge wants them to do, other than providing useless, token representation to clear constitutional requirements. I.e. someone technically has representation, even if that representation doesn't have time to actually form a legal case and can only serve as a liaison for whoever makes the plea deals.

1: https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/if-you-care-ab...

What really bother me is that the police sting operation is legal in US. It's fundamentally wrong. They are creating the crime by criminal police activities, from my point of view and it's legally true in my country's law system.

Prosecutors are also motivated to not have an expose written on how they sent numerous innocent people to jail. It's not just about conviction rate.

This works both ways. The US is experiencing a crime wave currently and in several major cities, it’s become next to impossible to actually send someone to jail due to political pressures. Most prosecutors are not running as tough on crime, but on equity platforms.

(In Seattle, for example, a candidate for prosecutor, Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, ran on abolishing the police, jails, and vowed not to prosecute most crimes.)

The US used to solve the majority of murder cases, but now it’s solving less than half. That’s 10,000 murderers just walking around free each year.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/07/poli...

> The US used to solve the majority of murder cases, but now it’s solving less than half

Closs the cases, not solve. It's good that police can't convict innocent people as easily anymore.

Even at the highest estimates of false imprisonments, it still means several thousands of murderers are walking free each year that wouldn’t have just 10 years ago.

Mathematically, no, it doesn't mean that. For a start, cases being cleared doesn't even imply that someone was arrested, just that the police decided they knew who did it. There could be zero false imprisonments and also close to zero accurate convictions, if the prosecutors just picked someone with a slam dunk case for one murder and accused them of all the others as well. Even easier if they pick a dead guy and close the case with him the assumed perpetrator - as referenced in the second paragraph of that article - because there's less chance that someone will fight the accusation. But either way, all the murderers except the one fall guy were able to walk away, and the police got a 100% clearance rate.

“Several thousand murderers are walking free each year” probably needs some more commitment - the thought experiment isn’t just saying these free murderers are living a life with no repercussions for past crimes but that this represents some quantity of future murders that would otherwise not happen.

Let’s say thousands of murderers going free that otherwise wouldn’t results in one person dying that otherwise wouldn’t.

Is one person unjustly dying with zero chance of resurrection better than one innocent person going to prison with a non-zero chance of exoneration?

> zero chance of resurrection

This assumes 100% chance of being murdered in the first place which isn't true.

If you put an innocent person I'm prison, they definitely suffer for no reason. If a guilty person goes free, they might commit another crime.

This perpetuates a common fallacy around criminal justice: the idea that there is a class of person called "murderer" who just goes around killing people left and right.

Now, it's true that there is a class of person who meets this description, but we don't call them "murderers". We call them "serial killers", and they're incredibly rare.

Decades of propaganda (some subtle, some overt) has put this notion of "once a murderer, always a murderer" into our collective consciousness, but in the vast majority of cases, that's not true at all. Almost everyone who commits murder has some clear, specific reason to do it at the time, and we would be much better served as a society if we would push harder for addressing those reasons (which, from what I understand, almost all come back to either "proper therapy/anger management" or "providing proper support for every person's basic survival needs") rather than expecting punishment to make people better.

I’m OK with that if it avoids innocent people rotting away their one life in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.

There are downsides to police and prosecutors abdicating their responsibilities. Urban flight and then eventually urban decay and despair. We will see what happens to dense liberal urban cities in America over the next 7-15 years. The trends are clear, alarm sirens are blaring, but people are instead patting themselves on the back.

I’m not suggesting we don’t prosecute crimes in general. I’m suggesting that we only sentence people for whom we are pretty damn sure (well over 99% sure).

If we release someone because there’s a 1 in 200 chance they’re not guilty, so be it. That’s not suggesting we release people where that chance is 0 in 200.

Id rather see dozens of criminals get away with a crime than see one innocent person rot in jail for nothing.

It’s interesting that you responded to a comment about “several thousand murderers” with a rejoinder about “dozens of criminals”, which represents some math or a value proposition you’re making about the “one innocent person”.

The innocent person is worth dozens, but not scores? And certainly “criminals” is a quite broad category - “dozens of shoplifters” but not “scores of pedophiles”?

Curious if that was intentional and where the line actually is.

Otherwise it seems you’re just expressing a cost-free emotional sentiment. In the world of policy with real consequences (violent crime) on real people (also at times innocent), the sentiment gives very little guidance, really only the barest start of an inquiry.

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