Are you aware of legal systems in other countries with lower false positives?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_...
> 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...).
https://innocenceproject.org/how-many-innocent-people-are-in...
(cite for not going to trial: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...)
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.
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.
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!
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".
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Exon...
[0] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-grisham-wrongful...
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%
So, most estimates suggest in the range of 2-10% of convictions are probably wrongful.
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.
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.
"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
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.