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Comment by jyounker | Hacker News Reader

When DNA matching was introduced, we discovered that at minimum 10% of people on death row were innocent. Death row cases are among the most litigated and examined cases. So, 10% is a reasonable floor, and we're already in double digits.

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That stat is off by a couple orders of magnitude. The total number of death penalty convictions overturned by DNA evidence is 29 (as of 2025). There are a couple thousand death row inmates right now, and the denominator here is all the people who were on death row in the last 20+ years. That's a rate of significantly <1%.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/first-death-row-exoneration-inv...

it doesn't matter if it's 29 or 2900. Even 1 is wrong.

The commenter isn't litigating that claim, they are litigating the claim that at least 1 out of 10 of those on death row were false.

Shouldn't the denominator be the number of people actually executed ? 691 in the last 20 years, for instance ?

"we discovered that at minimum 10% of people on death row were innocent"

How did we do that? I never heard this: certainly 10% of people on death row weren't exonerated by DNA? This is some kind of shaky extrapolation I assume?

When they choose the "DNA loci" to do SRT "matching" in the first place they convinced themselves it was a unique fingerprint and there never would be any duplicates in the database.

It only took a few years.

They've since changed and expanded the standard "DNA loci" to compensate.

> This reasonably sets a floor

I disagree wrt reasonableness. It’s just too big a leap. There are a lot of crimes, and not many land you on death row.

Hoo boy, welcome to the history of the United states.

The observation was that death row represents the highest level of scrutiny, and still had 10% false positives for guilt.

Is there any argument that less-scrutinized cases would have a lower level of false convictions?

The 10% claim has been refuted.

What % is it?

Read other replies. I don't think we have enough data to give an opinion exact number but less than 1

Why would you expect those cases to have lower rates of false conviction than normal cases?

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