5 ms·

Just FYI, in the 25 years and hundreds of cases my father saw in criminal court, only one was _not_ convicted: If you end up in front of a criminal judge (at le

Just FYI, in the 25 years and hundreds of cases my father saw in criminal court, only one was _not_ convicted: If you end up in front of a criminal judge (at least in California) you are essentially guaranteed of being convinced. There was one death penalty case he saw in that time and while conviction was, as always a certainty, a separate hearing decides "special circumstances" (execution) or just life in prison. To "help the judge make the right decision" the court room was packed to overflowing with a silent audience who obviously universally wanted the death penalty. So two defendants were sentenced to death for a single murder that day.

jacquesm 11y ago
> 25 years and hundreds of cases my father saw in criminal court, only one was _not_ convicted That seems very wrong.
- hawkice 11y ago
  If only because over 25 years surely he would have made it into the thousands of cases, unless he's doing less than one a week.
- Tomte 11y ago
  Or very right.
- whybroke 11y ago
  I agree. By the way, the single case that did not end in conviction was of a black preacher accused of child molestation who had an all black jury. And I'll bet most people reading this, trained by tv media's spectacular "everyone is guilty", are instantly and irreversibly convinced he actually was guilty just based on that one above sentence. But if you don't believe me (as you obviously do not) please do take 5 minutes to call a random criminal defense attorney in LA and ask the conviction rate once the defendant enters a not guilty plea.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    Last time I sat on a jury, before the evidence was all presented and before the judge even read the law (happens after all the evidence is presented, where the judge reads what the law actually is and explains things like how sure you need to be to find in favor of one party or the other), I heard jurors mention they already had their mind made up. They literally didn't even know what the crime actually was and were already ready to convict. It made me realize I never want to go before a jury if I'm innocent (not sure if a judge is better or not, haven't experience on that end).
  - LordKano 11y ago
    On one occasion, when I was in Jr High School, I was sent to the Principal's office. The assistant Principal started discussing my punishment and I chimed in that I didn't do what I was accused of doing. He said that the teacher wouldn't have used her time to send me to the office if I hadn't done what she said I did. I said that the reason we have trials is because sometimes the authorities make mistakes. He looked at me as if I had spoken to him in a foreign language.
  - gamblor956 11y ago
    I'll do you one better. I was a former criminal defense attorney in LA and the conviction rate once a defendant entered a not guilty plea was roughly 60% (and took it to trial) at the time I practiced criminal defense. Most people actually are guilty of the crimes they are charged with, and simply want to do their time and move on. A few are innocent, and most of them successfully defeat the charges against them, though it's not a popular topic online because it shatters the prevailing narrative. A very small portion of defendants that are innocent get convicted, usually because of their lawyer's incompetence and not because of overwhelming prosecutorial misconduct. The innocent defendants who plead guilty have themselves to blame--either they hired bad counsel, or they made the choice to plead despite the advice of counsel. This is not to say that prosecutorial misconduct does not occur -- it happens quite frequently. But it's not something that most prosecutors engage in and it's very rarely something that affects the outcome of a case.
    - makomk 11y ago
- philh 11y ago
  It could indicate that judges are overeager to convict, or it could indicate that prosecutors are unwilling to try someone they aren't really damn sure of. Or a combination of the two, or probably a bunch of other reasons.
  - Tomte 11y ago
    I don't know about the US, but in Germany it is definitely the "damn sure" case for the overwhelming number of all trials.
  - whybroke 11y ago
    Note that blind belief in the latter causes the former to happen: almost everyone in the courtroom including the jury (most criminal trials are jury trials) assumes the defendant is guilty otherwise he wouldn't be in court. The notion of assumed innocent until proven guilty does not actually exist in practice. Additionally, many prosecutors, police and people in the criminal justice system believe that, even if the defendant is ambiguously guilty of the crime they are on trail for currently, they are certainly guilty of other crimes they are not currently on trial for. Thus shading information to get a conviction in an ambiguous case is sometimes viewed as a public service. Interestingly this part of problem is not the result of malice or even ambitious DAs.
  - cubano 11y ago
    > It could indicate that judges are overeager to convict Judges don't convict, juries do. Just thought I'd clear that up.
    - jellicle 11y ago
      Most civil and criminal cases are adjudicated by a judge alone.
    - dtech 11y ago
      Are all US (criminal) court cases jury cases? Must be noted that this is only true for the US and other common law states, a lot of countries do not have or have only very limited notions of juries.
philh 11y ago
> If you end up in front of a criminal judge (at least in California) you are essentially guaranteed of being convinced. That seems untrue. http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/2015-Court-Statistics-Report.pdf http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/2015-Court-Statistics-Rep... I'm looking at page 47 (72 in the pdf). ~13% of felonies that make it to court result in acquittal, dismissal or transfer. There are a lot of caveats, including but not limited to: this is only felony cases (there are about 4x as many misdemeanours as felonies, but I can't immediately see statistics for them); I don't know what transfer means. But even with those caveats, my current guess is that your father didn't see a representative sample.
- whybroke 11y ago
  That's interesting. Yes my information is, in the end, anecdotal. It's good to get a concrete numbers (but note that transfer is not acquittal). Thanks for the adjustment.
- dtech 11y ago
  I believe transfer means that the case goes to another court, so depending on the percentage of cases transferred the actual conviction rate could still be quite high.
  - snarfy 11y ago
    Yes, including transfer in those numbers is misleading and dubious.
- jellicle 11y ago
  So you're saying the conviction rate is between 87% and 100%.
  - yesiamyourdad 11y ago
    Exactly. The phrase in question was "essentially guaranteed of being convinced". Even Vegas gives better odds than 87%.
- 11y ago
hobbyjogger 11y ago
Caveat: this study is for federal courts (which tend to see more serious crimes) but the data on acquittal rates is nowhere near what you are suggesting. http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1230&context=law_lawreview http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... 55% conviction rates when tried in front of a judge, 84% conviction rates when tried in front of a jury. Acquittal rates will also tend fall as the gravity of the charges/court falls--but a lot of that is explained by the prosecution being far more ready to drop charges (or choose not to charge at all) in close cases when the crime is seen as less serious. A marginal murder case, for example, might be pursued even though a just as marginal shoplifting case would not be.
- whybroke 11y ago
  Be aware also that federal courts only hear a very tiny percentage of criminal cases.
  - hobbyjogger 11y ago
    Sure, but again "conviction rate" is too coarse of a metric to make any meaningful conclusions about guilt/innocence or why the rate is so high. Japan, for example, has a 99% conviction rate but Ramseyer attributes much of that to the fact that prosecution offices are so understaffed and under-resourced there that they can manage to bring only the strongest of cases.[1] So you're much better off in a place like that because if you have a marginal case you won't even have to go to trial to be acquitted--the charges will be dropped beforehand. [1] http://legalombudsman.up.seesaa.net/image/199820Why20is20the20Japanese20Conviction20Rate20So20High.pdf http://legalombudsman.up.seesaa.net/image/199820Why20is20the...
    - whybroke 11y ago
      Very true. It alone tells us nothing except that, not knowing the cause of this conviction rate, you must accept any plea bargain whatever it is. To get a better understanding we would have to ask whether persons convicted under even the most careful trials (death penalty cases) are later exonerated eg https://www.aclu.org/dna-testing-and-death-penalty https://www.aclu.org/dna-testing-and-death-penalty We might also ask whether jurors enter the courtroom convinced the defendant is guilty before the trial even starts. Even here it might a coincidence: the defendants are always guilty anyway so the prejudice of the juries is irrelevant. Or we have to convince ourselves that prejudiced jurors always become open minded somewhere between voir dire and jury instruction. I suggest the later is not too believable and the former outright disturbing. We would have to explain why federal courts have significantly lower conviction rates than lower courts by saying something like lower court prosecutors prepare their cases better or federal judges are significantly more lenient. Intuitively neither explanation seems very satisfying. Finally we'd have to explain how charges that a DA is willing to drop during a plea bargain are then proven beyond a reasonable doubt at trial and explain how such a system, however money saving, has anything to do with justice. Ideally, given that the number of innocent people jailed is not zero, we'd determine objectively and openly what the number is and whether we are satisfied with that rate.

jacquesm 11y ago

> 25 years and hundreds of cases my father saw in criminal court, only one was _not_ convicted That seems very wrong.

hawkice 11y ago
If only because over 25 years surely he would have made it into the thousands of cases, unless he's doing less than one a week.
Tomte 11y ago
Or very right.
whybroke 11y ago
I agree. By the way, the single case that did not end in conviction was of a black preacher accused of child molestation who had an all black jury. And I'll bet most people reading this, trained by tv media's spectacular "everyone is guilty", are instantly and irreversibly convinced he actually was guilty just based on that one above sentence. But if you don't believe me (as you obviously do not) please do take 5 minutes to call a random criminal defense attorney in LA and ask the conviction rate once the defendant enters a not guilty plea.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  Last time I sat on a jury, before the evidence was all presented and before the judge even read the law (happens after all the evidence is presented, where the judge reads what the law actually is and explains things like how sure you need to be to find in favor of one party or the other), I heard jurors mention they already had their mind made up. They literally didn't even know what the crime actually was and were already ready to convict. It made me realize I never want to go before a jury if I'm innocent (not sure if a judge is better or not, haven't experience on that end).
- LordKano 11y ago
  On one occasion, when I was in Jr High School, I was sent to the Principal's office. The assistant Principal started discussing my punishment and I chimed in that I didn't do what I was accused of doing. He said that the teacher wouldn't have used her time to send me to the office if I hadn't done what she said I did. I said that the reason we have trials is because sometimes the authorities make mistakes. He looked at me as if I had spoken to him in a foreign language.
- gamblor956 11y ago
  I'll do you one better. I was a former criminal defense attorney in LA and the conviction rate once a defendant entered a not guilty plea was roughly 60% (and took it to trial) at the time I practiced criminal defense. Most people actually are guilty of the crimes they are charged with, and simply want to do their time and move on. A few are innocent, and most of them successfully defeat the charges against them, though it's not a popular topic online because it shatters the prevailing narrative. A very small portion of defendants that are innocent get convicted, usually because of their lawyer's incompetence and not because of overwhelming prosecutorial misconduct. The innocent defendants who plead guilty have themselves to blame--either they hired bad counsel, or they made the choice to plead despite the advice of counsel. This is not to say that prosecutorial misconduct does not occur -- it happens quite frequently. But it's not something that most prosecutors engage in and it's very rarely something that affects the outcome of a case.
  - makomk 11y ago
philh 11y ago
It could indicate that judges are overeager to convict, or it could indicate that prosecutors are unwilling to try someone they aren't really damn sure of. Or a combination of the two, or probably a bunch of other reasons.
- Tomte 11y ago
  I don't know about the US, but in Germany it is definitely the "damn sure" case for the overwhelming number of all trials.
- whybroke 11y ago
  Note that blind belief in the latter causes the former to happen: almost everyone in the courtroom including the jury (most criminal trials are jury trials) assumes the defendant is guilty otherwise he wouldn't be in court. The notion of assumed innocent until proven guilty does not actually exist in practice. Additionally, many prosecutors, police and people in the criminal justice system believe that, even if the defendant is ambiguously guilty of the crime they are on trail for currently, they are certainly guilty of other crimes they are not currently on trial for. Thus shading information to get a conviction in an ambiguous case is sometimes viewed as a public service. Interestingly this part of problem is not the result of malice or even ambitious DAs.
- cubano 11y ago
  > It could indicate that judges are overeager to convict Judges don't convict, juries do. Just thought I'd clear that up.
  - jellicle 11y ago
    Most civil and criminal cases are adjudicated by a judge alone.
  - dtech 11y ago
    Are all US (criminal) court cases jury cases? Must be noted that this is only true for the US and other common law states, a lot of countries do not have or have only very limited notions of juries.

philh 11y ago

> If you end up in front of a criminal judge (at least in California) you are essentially guaranteed of being convinced. That seems untrue. http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/2015-Court-Statistics-Report.pdf http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/2015-Court-Statistics-Rep... I'm looking at page 47 (72 in the pdf). ~13% of felonies that make it to court result in acquittal, dismissal or transfer. There are a lot of caveats, including but not limited to: this is only felony cases (there are about 4x as many misdemeanours as felonies, but I can't immediately see statistics for them); I don't know what transfer means. But even with those caveats, my current guess is that your father didn't see a representative sample.

whybroke 11y ago
That's interesting. Yes my information is, in the end, anecdotal. It's good to get a concrete numbers (but note that transfer is not acquittal). Thanks for the adjustment.
dtech 11y ago
I believe transfer means that the case goes to another court, so depending on the percentage of cases transferred the actual conviction rate could still be quite high.
- snarfy 11y ago
  Yes, including transfer in those numbers is misleading and dubious.
jellicle 11y ago
So you're saying the conviction rate is between 87% and 100%.
- yesiamyourdad 11y ago
  Exactly. The phrase in question was "essentially guaranteed of being convinced". Even Vegas gives better odds than 87%.
11y ago

hobbyjogger 11y ago

Caveat: this study is for federal courts (which tend to see more serious crimes) but the data on acquittal rates is nowhere near what you are suggesting. http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1230&context=law_lawreview http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... 55% conviction rates when tried in front of a judge, 84% conviction rates when tried in front of a jury. Acquittal rates will also tend fall as the gravity of the charges/court falls--but a lot of that is explained by the prosecution being far more ready to drop charges (or choose not to charge at all) in close cases when the crime is seen as less serious. A marginal murder case, for example, might be pursued even though a just as marginal shoplifting case would not be.

whybroke 11y ago
Be aware also that federal courts only hear a very tiny percentage of criminal cases.
- hobbyjogger 11y ago
  Sure, but again "conviction rate" is too coarse of a metric to make any meaningful conclusions about guilt/innocence or why the rate is so high. Japan, for example, has a 99% conviction rate but Ramseyer attributes much of that to the fact that prosecution offices are so understaffed and under-resourced there that they can manage to bring only the strongest of cases.[1] So you're much better off in a place like that because if you have a marginal case you won't even have to go to trial to be acquitted--the charges will be dropped beforehand. [1] http://legalombudsman.up.seesaa.net/image/199820Why20is20the20Japanese20Conviction20Rate20So20High.pdf http://legalombudsman.up.seesaa.net/image/199820Why20is20the...
  - whybroke 11y ago
    Very true. It alone tells us nothing except that, not knowing the cause of this conviction rate, you must accept any plea bargain whatever it is. To get a better understanding we would have to ask whether persons convicted under even the most careful trials (death penalty cases) are later exonerated eg https://www.aclu.org/dna-testing-and-death-penalty https://www.aclu.org/dna-testing-and-death-penalty We might also ask whether jurors enter the courtroom convinced the defendant is guilty before the trial even starts. Even here it might a coincidence: the defendants are always guilty anyway so the prejudice of the juries is irrelevant. Or we have to convince ourselves that prejudiced jurors always become open minded somewhere between voir dire and jury instruction. I suggest the later is not too believable and the former outright disturbing. We would have to explain why federal courts have significantly lower conviction rates than lower courts by saying something like lower court prosecutors prepare their cases better or federal judges are significantly more lenient. Intuitively neither explanation seems very satisfying. Finally we'd have to explain how charges that a DA is willing to drop during a plea bargain are then proven beyond a reasonable doubt at trial and explain how such a system, however money saving, has anything to do with justice. Ideally, given that the number of innocent people jailed is not zero, we'd determine objectively and openly what the number is and whether we are satisfied with that rate.