4 ms·
> 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.c
by 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 agoThat'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 agoI 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 agoYes, including transfer in those numbers is misleading and dubious.
- jellicle 11y agoSo you're saying the conviction rate is between 87% and 100%.
- yesiamyourdad 11y agoExactly. The phrase in question was "essentially guaranteed of being convinced". Even Vegas gives better odds than 87%.
- fweespeech 11y agoIncluding transfer makes it unusable.
- philh 11y agoAnother data source: http://www.grandjuryfoundation.org/lgdaconvict.php http://www.grandjuryfoundation.org/lgdaconvict.php Table 1 gives the ten-year average 1996-2005 for California as 84% criminal conviction rate.