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Comment by monsterix | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about what percentage of incarcerated population in the US is innocent. US holds roughly 2.3 MM inmates in its prisons, that's highest rate of incarceration[1] in the world. Wondering if there is a way to put a number, or guess the percentage of innocent civilians serving jail time at any given point of time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...

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I'm also curious as to how many innocent americans are executed.

Given the huge number of Prisoners who have been on death row and exonerated, there must have been quite a few in the past prior to technologies like DNA testing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution

Note - this doesn't even include those who were innocent, but not provably so.

Not too too many. There aren't very many executions in the US, is is losing popularity in public opinion and not practiced in all states. However, it is legal for federal crimes and military courts.

For example, New York had a death penalty in 1995 that was never used and declared unconstitutional in 2004. Since the death row has been disbanded by executive order and it is unlikely executions will ever take place in NY again.

43 immates were executed in 2012.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Uni...

The hope was that in recent history, far fewer people had been executed, particularly as technology, and better knowledge of what types of evidence stand up to scrutiny has improved.

I was more pondering, how many people in the past have been executed wrongly by the united states.

A quick google search suggests that 14,634 were executed in the period 1608-1987. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions.php

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