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>More than a quarter of the 365 people exonerated in recent decades by the nonprofit Innocence Project had confessed to their alleged crime. Using guessimation
by maxheadroom 7y ago
>More than a quarter of the 365 people exonerated in recent decades by the nonprofit Innocence Project had confessed to their alleged crime.
Using guessimation, x would be the numer of people that confessed that were innocent, so 91.25 < x < 182.5, and that, alone, was the principally driving force (assumptive, I'm aware) to convict them - and these are the numbers that we're aware of because of the overturned convictions.
Whilst I can understand the reprieve it must give police and the district attorneys in the efforts of building a case, it almost seems as if they just kind of give up applying any further scrutiny, once any confession is had - whether the person actually committed the crime or not.
I'm not sure why this breakdown, for lack of a better vernacular at present, occurs though.
Is it antipathy? Is it because numbers are more important than anything else (e.g.: for elected positions such as Sheriffs)? Is it because we ply the path of least of resistance to the investigating demeanor?
I'm sure a lot of the convictions in the past are biased for varying other degrees but this seems to infer that even without those other degrees of influence, we have a high margin of error for putting innocent people away.
Add those varying degrees referenced above into the equation and I'm not so sure that the deflection, "It's not a perfect system but it works," is really applicable, anymore.
- tedmcory77 7y agoIt’s my understanding they are metric’d on wins....
- stevenwoo 7y agoSerial's third season podcast series covered this a bit, since the 1980's or so in the USA, we've decreased funding for the judicial system, and not increased prosecutors funding and staff to commensurate with increased crimes due to larger population (if crime rate stayed the same or even decreased.) This puts a lot of pressure on prosecutors to get plea bargains, the logical gaming of the system by prosecutors is to layer on as many of the hardest charges possible, then offer a plea bargain that has a fraction of the penalty of the initial charges. We do not have enough courthouses to actually let every defendent get judged by a jury of their peers. Even if one is innocent, rational people will choose to plea guilty given that prosecutors have something like a 95% conviction rate in the USA and all the resources of their local/state/federal government behind the prosecution. Someone facetiously but based on my viewing of The Wire and The Shield, large city police departments are judged on finding someone to charge with reported crimes and having a lot of open unsolved crimes is seen as a terrible statistic, there's no extra reward in finding the actual person who did each crime so some might find a perverse incentive to clear crimes no matter what.