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What scares me about US legal system is; Elected prosectutors are motivated by high conviction rate for obvious reasons (re-election and politics of it all). Ad

What scares me about US legal system is; Elected prosectutors are motivated by high conviction rate for obvious reasons (re-election and politics of it all). Add the fact that their line of work requires competitive personalities and you become just but a number, especially if you don't have competent cousel. I'm not saying ALL public defendors are incompetent, but we see to many cases of ineffective representation when the accused cannot afford a high powered attorney. Yes - you should be scared of ordinary prosectutors in suits doing their "best" job more than a gang member for example! They want are motivated to win at all cost... short of obviously illegal ways.

caminante 4y ago
False positives are rare in the US [0]: estimated at only 1% of incarcerations according to the Innocence Project (mentioned in HN article) and go even lower depending on who does the analysis. Are you aware of legal systems in other countries with lower false positives? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_...
- tremon 4y ago
  Does that 1% include the number of people who accepted a plea deal, or only the number of wrongful convictions after a case has gone to trial?
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  If every time you enter the legal system and you have a 1% chance of being falsely convicted, that is a broken and dangerous system regardless of how other countries fare at that metric. Especially if you consider that certain underprivileged demographics are already at a higher risk of having more run-ins with the police regardless of their criminal state.
  - caminante 4y ago
    > that is a broken and dangerous system regardless of how other countries fare at that metric. No. It's on topic because the parent singled out the US, and I'm curious if other countries are taking procedures that could be adopted in the US to reduce false positives and ALSO false negatives.
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      Wait, why do you think it's necessary to also reduce false negatives? Suppose there are five people who stole some candy, out of 100 people in the village. I claim that a system A in which three of the actual thieves are successfully convicted, but the others escape is better than a system B in which four people are successfully convicted, three of them are thieves but one is innocent. You seem to disagree, insisting a better system must also reduce false negatives.
      - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
        If you don't care about reducing false negatives, then the ideal policy is simply to abolish prisons because that results in zero falsely imprisoned people.
        rfrey 4y ago
        They said they don't think it's essential to reduce false negatives, presumably from current levels. That's quite different than your reducto ad absurdum.
        caminante 4y ago
        Well, GP/"they" didn't do a good job being clear. They laid out two scenarios with 5 people stealing candy. A. 0% false positive; 40% false negative B. 20% false positive; 20% false negative (or maybe 4 people convicted with 1 innocent.) Either way, the false negative % decreased, and it seemed like the point was that they viewed A as morally superior (at the expense of higher false negatives). Overall, sure. You don't have to necessarily decrease the false negative rate, however, it's something that ideally doesn't go up, all else equal.
  - PebblesRox 4y ago
    > If every time you enter the legal system and you have a 1% chance of being falsely convicted I agree with you that 1% is a high number in this context, but I don't think the math works for what you're saying here. If 1 out of 100 convictions are of innocent people, that doesn't mean that 1 out of 100 innocent people put on trial are going to get convicted. That rate could be higher or lower than 1% because it depends how many innocent people are rightfully judged innocent. Hypothetically, a court system that always returns a guilty verdict could have a 1% false conviction rate if 99% of people put on trial are actually guilty. But the rate of wrongful conviction for an innocent person entering this system would be 100%.
    - Clent 4y ago
      The United State's conviction rate is more than 75% -- You are assuming a fair outcome. The innocent person has a 75% change of being convicted. A plea deal of the innocent isn't counted if it avoids jail time. Better to deal with the cost and hassle of parole than being prisoner where you are legally on the same level as a slave.
      - wizzwizz4 4y ago
        > The innocent person has a 75% change of being convicted. If the conviction rate is 75%, and the percent of convictions that are innocent is 5%, wouldn't that make an innocent's conviction chance at most 30%? Edit: I'm silly. It's at least 30%. If some of the unconvicted are guilty, the denominator of innocents is smaller.
        ummonk 4y ago
        Most convictions aren’t via trial but via plea bargains. It’s fair to assume that innocent people are less likely to take a plea bargain than guilty people, so the chances of getting falsely convicted could be quite high for an innocent person going to trial.
- giantg2 4y ago
  More like 2-10%. And that's only for the incarcerated. There are many more that take deals to avoid prison time and rotting in jail for 2 years just to get a trial, etc. https://thehighcourt.co/wrongful-convictions-statistics/ https://thehighcourt.co/wrongful-convictions-statistics/ Edit: can't find the actual article. Child commenter goes into great detail about this being a rather solid range though.
  - caminante 4y ago
    Where is the 2-10% in the source document [0]? I couldn't find it in a brief glance. [0] https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Exonerations_in_2019.pdf https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Exon...
    - giantg2 4y ago
      Looks like they're referencing the LA Times but I can't find the actual article.
      - caminante 4y ago
        I see the stat referenced in an LA Times OpEd [0] by the fiction author, John Grisham, but hit a dead end. [0] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-grisham-wrongful-convictions-20180311-story.html https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-grisham-wrongful...
        giantg2 4y ago
        Interesting that other places would cite an OpEd. Seems like the other commenter has more indepth details than the OpEd.
  - DannyBee 4y ago
    Both overall cite NRE data. So may be better to go to the source (and the latest version). https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/NRE%20Annual%20Report%202021.pdf https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/NRE%... is the 2021 National registry of exonerations annual report. What you'll see, interestingly, is neither the 2021, nor 2019 report, estimate the prevalence of wrongful conviction directly. In particular, the claim "According to the 2019 annual report by the National Registry of Exonerations, wrongful convictions statistics show that the percentage of wrongful convictions is somewhere between 2% and 10%. " It does not say that. It offers no percent view on the rate of wrongful convictions. It only offers the direct number of exonerations, exonerations broken down by race, by crime type, etc. It points out lots of statistical things (exonerations are not evenly distributed by race, crime, etc) Someone else, with some other (not obviously explained) methodology is using that to calculate wrongful conviction rates. That said, roughly all sources i can find are within the 2-12% rate bound (IE i see a number saying 3-6%, a number saying 1%, a number saying 12-13%). The only truly easily found study (IE pops up immediately on google search) is federal: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/251115.pdf https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/251115.pdf The DOJ funded the urban justice institute to figure this out back in 2017, and the rate they came up with was also ~11%. In there, they point to/compare with previous studies on DNA evidence that suggest a rate of 12.5%
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  The actual source mentions the 1% being 'conservative'. Considering the Duluth model rules in many DV cases and there is an obvious bias towards not admitting false positives, I'd be surprised if that conservative measure was a maximum.
- justin66 4y ago
  A 1% false positive conviction rate is not comforting.
- sanp 4y ago
  This doesn’t show what the false positive number is from African Americans or Latinos.
  - jollofricepeas 4y ago
    Historically, this number would be just really depressing. If police brutality numbers are higher against black and brown persons, I’d assume the false positive number for convictions is awful especially in the Southern US. Bias against the poor and minorities isn’t limited to police but extends to juries, judges and prosecutors sadly.
- el_nahual 4y ago
  That number doesn't seem right to me so I followed the wikipedia citation. It cites "The Innocence Project", which actually says: > the few studies that have been done estimate that between 2.3% and 5% of all prisoners in the U.S. are innocent (for context, if just 1% of all prisoners are innocent, that would mean that more than 20,000 innocent people are in prison). https://innocenceproject.org/contact/#:~:text=How%20many%20innocent%20people%20are,innocent%20people%20are%20in%20prison https://innocenceproject.org/contact/#:~:text=How%20many%20i...).
  - nostromo 4y ago
    The 1% actually cites the estimation method (extrapolation from DNA exonerations). The higher 2.3-5% doesn’t. What studies are those? https://innocenceproject.org/how-many-innocent-people-are-in-prison/ https://innocenceproject.org/how-many-innocent-people-are-in...
    - systoll 4y ago
      https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=996629 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=996629 , is the 2.3% https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228207991_Innocents_Convicted_An_Empirically_Justified_Factual_Wrongful_Conviction_Rate https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228207991_Innocents... is the 5%.
      - lazyasciiart 4y ago
        And for context: both of those numbers are based on studying proven false convictions of people given the death penalty, which of course is a) supposed to have a high bar of evidence to convict in the first place and b) does have an incredibly high bar of both evidence and legal argument to be proven innocent after conviction. Since the majority of people convicted of crimes in the USA didn't even go to trial, it is realistically impossible that this number applies to all people in prison - the percentage of false overall convictions must be higher than the percentage of people who were sentenced to death and then proved themselves innocent, given the different pressures and levels of scrutiny on different crimes. (cite for not going to trial: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-because-prosecutors-are-coercing-plea-deals-yes-ncna1034201 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...)
- Retric 4y ago
  2% of people on death row get exonerated and that’s an underestimate due to the difficulty in proving innocence. Most crimes don’t see anything close to that level of review before or after conviction with death row reserved for the most clear cut cases. So, most estimates suggest in the range of 2-10% of convictions are probably wrongful.
  - lliamander 4y ago
    > due to the difficulty in proving innocence. Remember: the person started out in a position of presumed innocence, and were found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I would expect it to be hard to prove innocence after enough evidence was provided to prove guilt. Note: I am not saying the system always operates according to principles - that's why those 2% get exonerated. I just wouldn't expect the real number of falsely convicted to be much (if any) higher.
    - Retric 4y ago
      Perhaps I phrased it poorly. The standard for proving innocence is raised above a “Preponderance of the evidence” to “Clear and convincing evidence.” That’s a high standard which if lowered would obviously see more innocent people set free. But we shouldn’t assume there is actually any evidence proving innocence, after all before DNA testing many people who would currently be set free where killed. At best we can estimate who would be set free if we could actually view the past.
    - Volundr 4y ago
      If beyond a reasonable doubt is required to convict someone, shouldn't we overturn the conviction as soon as reasonable doubt is introduced? Why would it be desirable that we uphold a conviction that shouldn't have been handed down in the first place if the information was discovered before instead of after the verdict?
- rfrey 4y ago
  Notwithstanding the other replies to your comment estimating as high as 5%, 1% struck me as shockingly high.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  1% false positive for criminal conviction is horrifically bad and does not meet with the plain English “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, IMO.
- vdqtp3 4y ago
  Interesting that those are the numbers. "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved." Ben Franklin https://www.bartleby.com/73/953.html https://www.bartleby.com/73/953.html
lalopalota 4y ago
Most public defenders are competent at their job. Unfortunately, their job is to minimize the court's time spent spent dealing with their clients.
- everforward 4y ago
  > Unfortunately, their job is to minimize the court's time spent spent dealing with their clients. I think this is the unfortunate reality of them being obligated to take cases even if they don't really have enough defenders. This is an interesting read [1]. The TL;DR of that link is in Montana the head of the public defender's office was held in contempt and fined for refusing too many cases because they don't have the staffing. I don't know what the judge wants them to do, other than providing useless, token representation to clear constitutional requirements. I.e. someone technically has representation, even if that representation doesn't have time to actually form a legal case and can only serve as a liaison for whoever makes the plea deals. 1: https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/if-you-care-about-freedom-you-should-be-asking-why-we-dont-fund-our-public-defender-systems https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/if-you-care-ab...
nostromo 4y ago
This works both ways. The US is experiencing a crime wave currently and in several major cities, it’s become next to impossible to actually send someone to jail due to political pressures. Most prosecutors are not running as tough on crime, but on equity platforms. (In Seattle, for example, a candidate for prosecutor, Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, ran on abolishing the police, jails, and vowed not to prosecute most crimes.) The US used to solve the majority of murder cases, but now it’s solving less than half. That’s 10,000 murderers just walking around free each year. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/07/police-murder-clearance-rate/661500/ https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/07/poli...
- lupire 4y ago
  > The US used to solve the majority of murder cases, but now it’s solving less than half Closs the cases, not solve. It's good that police can't convict innocent people as easily anymore.
  - nostromo 4y ago
    Even at the highest estimates of false imprisonments, it still means several thousands of murderers are walking free each year that wouldn’t have just 10 years ago.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      I’m OK with that if it avoids innocent people rotting away their one life in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.
      - parkingrift 4y ago
        There are downsides to police and prosecutors abdicating their responsibilities. Urban flight and then eventually urban decay and despair. We will see what happens to dense liberal urban cities in America over the next 7-15 years. The trends are clear, alarm sirens are blaring, but people are instead patting themselves on the back.
googlryas 4y ago
Prosecutors are also motivated to not have an expose written on how they sent numerous innocent people to jail. It's not just about conviction rate.
ezoe 4y ago
What really bother me is that the police sting operation is legal in US. It's fundamentally wrong. They are creating the crime by criminal police activities, from my point of view and it's legally true in my country's law system.

caminante 4y ago

False positives are rare in the US [0]: estimated at only 1% of incarcerations according to the Innocence Project (mentioned in HN article) and go even lower depending on who does the analysis. Are you aware of legal systems in other countries with lower false positives? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_...

tremon 4y ago
Does that 1% include the number of people who accepted a plea deal, or only the number of wrongful convictions after a case has gone to trial?
polygamous_bat 4y ago
If every time you enter the legal system and you have a 1% chance of being falsely convicted, that is a broken and dangerous system regardless of how other countries fare at that metric. Especially if you consider that certain underprivileged demographics are already at a higher risk of having more run-ins with the police regardless of their criminal state.
- caminante 4y ago
  > that is a broken and dangerous system regardless of how other countries fare at that metric. No. It's on topic because the parent singled out the US, and I'm curious if other countries are taking procedures that could be adopted in the US to reduce false positives and ALSO false negatives.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    Wait, why do you think it's necessary to also reduce false negatives? Suppose there are five people who stole some candy, out of 100 people in the village. I claim that a system A in which three of the actual thieves are successfully convicted, but the others escape is better than a system B in which four people are successfully convicted, three of them are thieves but one is innocent. You seem to disagree, insisting a better system must also reduce false negatives.
    - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
      If you don't care about reducing false negatives, then the ideal policy is simply to abolish prisons because that results in zero falsely imprisoned people.
      - rfrey 4y ago
        They said they don't think it's essential to reduce false negatives, presumably from current levels. That's quite different than your reducto ad absurdum.
        caminante 4y ago
        Well, GP/"they" didn't do a good job being clear. They laid out two scenarios with 5 people stealing candy. A. 0% false positive; 40% false negative B. 20% false positive; 20% false negative (or maybe 4 people convicted with 1 innocent.) Either way, the false negative % decreased, and it seemed like the point was that they viewed A as morally superior (at the expense of higher false negatives). Overall, sure. You don't have to necessarily decrease the false negative rate, however, it's something that ideally doesn't go up, all else equal.
- PebblesRox 4y ago
  > If every time you enter the legal system and you have a 1% chance of being falsely convicted I agree with you that 1% is a high number in this context, but I don't think the math works for what you're saying here. If 1 out of 100 convictions are of innocent people, that doesn't mean that 1 out of 100 innocent people put on trial are going to get convicted. That rate could be higher or lower than 1% because it depends how many innocent people are rightfully judged innocent. Hypothetically, a court system that always returns a guilty verdict could have a 1% false conviction rate if 99% of people put on trial are actually guilty. But the rate of wrongful conviction for an innocent person entering this system would be 100%.
  - Clent 4y ago
    The United State's conviction rate is more than 75% -- You are assuming a fair outcome. The innocent person has a 75% change of being convicted. A plea deal of the innocent isn't counted if it avoids jail time. Better to deal with the cost and hassle of parole than being prisoner where you are legally on the same level as a slave.
    - wizzwizz4 4y ago
      > The innocent person has a 75% change of being convicted. If the conviction rate is 75%, and the percent of convictions that are innocent is 5%, wouldn't that make an innocent's conviction chance at most 30%? Edit: I'm silly. It's at least 30%. If some of the unconvicted are guilty, the denominator of innocents is smaller.
      - ummonk 4y ago
        Most convictions aren’t via trial but via plea bargains. It’s fair to assume that innocent people are less likely to take a plea bargain than guilty people, so the chances of getting falsely convicted could be quite high for an innocent person going to trial.
giantg2 4y ago
More like 2-10%. And that's only for the incarcerated. There are many more that take deals to avoid prison time and rotting in jail for 2 years just to get a trial, etc. https://thehighcourt.co/wrongful-convictions-statistics/ https://thehighcourt.co/wrongful-convictions-statistics/ Edit: can't find the actual article. Child commenter goes into great detail about this being a rather solid range though.
- caminante 4y ago
  Where is the 2-10% in the source document [0]? I couldn't find it in a brief glance. [0] https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Exonerations_in_2019.pdf https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Exon...
  - giantg2 4y ago
    Looks like they're referencing the LA Times but I can't find the actual article.
    - caminante 4y ago
      I see the stat referenced in an LA Times OpEd [0] by the fiction author, John Grisham, but hit a dead end. [0] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-grisham-wrongful-convictions-20180311-story.html https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-grisham-wrongful...
      - giantg2 4y ago
        Interesting that other places would cite an OpEd. Seems like the other commenter has more indepth details than the OpEd.
- DannyBee 4y ago
  Both overall cite NRE data. So may be better to go to the source (and the latest version). https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/NRE%20Annual%20Report%202021.pdf https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/NRE%... is the 2021 National registry of exonerations annual report. What you'll see, interestingly, is neither the 2021, nor 2019 report, estimate the prevalence of wrongful conviction directly. In particular, the claim "According to the 2019 annual report by the National Registry of Exonerations, wrongful convictions statistics show that the percentage of wrongful convictions is somewhere between 2% and 10%. " It does not say that. It offers no percent view on the rate of wrongful convictions. It only offers the direct number of exonerations, exonerations broken down by race, by crime type, etc. It points out lots of statistical things (exonerations are not evenly distributed by race, crime, etc) Someone else, with some other (not obviously explained) methodology is using that to calculate wrongful conviction rates. That said, roughly all sources i can find are within the 2-12% rate bound (IE i see a number saying 3-6%, a number saying 1%, a number saying 12-13%). The only truly easily found study (IE pops up immediately on google search) is federal: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/251115.pdf https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/251115.pdf The DOJ funded the urban justice institute to figure this out back in 2017, and the rate they came up with was also ~11%. In there, they point to/compare with previous studies on DNA evidence that suggest a rate of 12.5%
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
The actual source mentions the 1% being 'conservative'. Considering the Duluth model rules in many DV cases and there is an obvious bias towards not admitting false positives, I'd be surprised if that conservative measure was a maximum.
justin66 4y ago
A 1% false positive conviction rate is not comforting.
sanp 4y ago
This doesn’t show what the false positive number is from African Americans or Latinos.
- jollofricepeas 4y ago
  Historically, this number would be just really depressing. If police brutality numbers are higher against black and brown persons, I’d assume the false positive number for convictions is awful especially in the Southern US. Bias against the poor and minorities isn’t limited to police but extends to juries, judges and prosecutors sadly.
el_nahual 4y ago
That number doesn't seem right to me so I followed the wikipedia citation. It cites "The Innocence Project", which actually says: > the few studies that have been done estimate that between 2.3% and 5% of all prisoners in the U.S. are innocent (for context, if just 1% of all prisoners are innocent, that would mean that more than 20,000 innocent people are in prison). https://innocenceproject.org/contact/#:~:text=How%20many%20innocent%20people%20are,innocent%20people%20are%20in%20prison https://innocenceproject.org/contact/#:~:text=How%20many%20i...).
- nostromo 4y ago
  The 1% actually cites the estimation method (extrapolation from DNA exonerations). The higher 2.3-5% doesn’t. What studies are those? https://innocenceproject.org/how-many-innocent-people-are-in-prison/ https://innocenceproject.org/how-many-innocent-people-are-in...
  - systoll 4y ago
    https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=996629 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=996629 , is the 2.3% https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228207991_Innocents_Convicted_An_Empirically_Justified_Factual_Wrongful_Conviction_Rate https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228207991_Innocents... is the 5%.
    - lazyasciiart 4y ago
      And for context: both of those numbers are based on studying proven false convictions of people given the death penalty, which of course is a) supposed to have a high bar of evidence to convict in the first place and b) does have an incredibly high bar of both evidence and legal argument to be proven innocent after conviction. Since the majority of people convicted of crimes in the USA didn't even go to trial, it is realistically impossible that this number applies to all people in prison - the percentage of false overall convictions must be higher than the percentage of people who were sentenced to death and then proved themselves innocent, given the different pressures and levels of scrutiny on different crimes. (cite for not going to trial: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-because-prosecutors-are-coercing-plea-deals-yes-ncna1034201 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...)
Retric 4y ago
2% of people on death row get exonerated and that’s an underestimate due to the difficulty in proving innocence. Most crimes don’t see anything close to that level of review before or after conviction with death row reserved for the most clear cut cases. So, most estimates suggest in the range of 2-10% of convictions are probably wrongful.
- lliamander 4y ago
  > due to the difficulty in proving innocence. Remember: the person started out in a position of presumed innocence, and were found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I would expect it to be hard to prove innocence after enough evidence was provided to prove guilt. Note: I am not saying the system always operates according to principles - that's why those 2% get exonerated. I just wouldn't expect the real number of falsely convicted to be much (if any) higher.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Perhaps I phrased it poorly. The standard for proving innocence is raised above a “Preponderance of the evidence” to “Clear and convincing evidence.” That’s a high standard which if lowered would obviously see more innocent people set free. But we shouldn’t assume there is actually any evidence proving innocence, after all before DNA testing many people who would currently be set free where killed. At best we can estimate who would be set free if we could actually view the past.
  - Volundr 4y ago
    If beyond a reasonable doubt is required to convict someone, shouldn't we overturn the conviction as soon as reasonable doubt is introduced? Why would it be desirable that we uphold a conviction that shouldn't have been handed down in the first place if the information was discovered before instead of after the verdict?
rfrey 4y ago
Notwithstanding the other replies to your comment estimating as high as 5%, 1% struck me as shockingly high.
sokoloff 4y ago
1% false positive for criminal conviction is horrifically bad and does not meet with the plain English “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, IMO.
vdqtp3 4y ago
Interesting that those are the numbers. "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved." Ben Franklin https://www.bartleby.com/73/953.html https://www.bartleby.com/73/953.html

lalopalota 4y ago

Most public defenders are competent at their job. Unfortunately, their job is to minimize the court's time spent spent dealing with their clients.

everforward 4y ago
> Unfortunately, their job is to minimize the court's time spent spent dealing with their clients. I think this is the unfortunate reality of them being obligated to take cases even if they don't really have enough defenders. This is an interesting read [1]. The TL;DR of that link is in Montana the head of the public defender's office was held in contempt and fined for refusing too many cases because they don't have the staffing. I don't know what the judge wants them to do, other than providing useless, token representation to clear constitutional requirements. I.e. someone technically has representation, even if that representation doesn't have time to actually form a legal case and can only serve as a liaison for whoever makes the plea deals. 1: https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/if-you-care-about-freedom-you-should-be-asking-why-we-dont-fund-our-public-defender-systems https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/if-you-care-ab...

nostromo 4y ago

This works both ways. The US is experiencing a crime wave currently and in several major cities, it’s become next to impossible to actually send someone to jail due to political pressures. Most prosecutors are not running as tough on crime, but on equity platforms. (In Seattle, for example, a candidate for prosecutor, Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, ran on abolishing the police, jails, and vowed not to prosecute most crimes.) The US used to solve the majority of murder cases, but now it’s solving less than half. That’s 10,000 murderers just walking around free each year. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/07/police-murder-clearance-rate/661500/ https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/07/poli...

lupire 4y ago
> The US used to solve the majority of murder cases, but now it’s solving less than half Closs the cases, not solve. It's good that police can't convict innocent people as easily anymore.
- nostromo 4y ago
  Even at the highest estimates of false imprisonments, it still means several thousands of murderers are walking free each year that wouldn’t have just 10 years ago.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I’m OK with that if it avoids innocent people rotting away their one life in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.
    - parkingrift 4y ago
      There are downsides to police and prosecutors abdicating their responsibilities. Urban flight and then eventually urban decay and despair. We will see what happens to dense liberal urban cities in America over the next 7-15 years. The trends are clear, alarm sirens are blaring, but people are instead patting themselves on the back.

googlryas 4y ago

Prosecutors are also motivated to not have an expose written on how they sent numerous innocent people to jail. It's not just about conviction rate.

ezoe 4y ago

What really bother me is that the police sting operation is legal in US. It's fundamentally wrong. They are creating the crime by criminal police activities, from my point of view and it's legally true in my country's law system.