Overstating America’s Wrongful Conviction Rate? Reassessing the Conventional Wisdom About the Prevalence of Wrongful Convictions

A growing body of academic literature discusses the problem of wrongful convictions—i.e., convictions of factually innocent defendants for crimes they did not commit. But how often do such miscarriages of justice actually occur? Justice Scalia cited a figure of 0.027% as a possible error rate. But the conventional view in the literature is that, for violent crimes, the error rate is much higher—at least 1%, and perhaps as high as 4% or even more.

This Article disputes that conventional wisdom. Based on a careful review of the available empirical literature, it is possible to assemble the component parts of a wrongful conviction rate calculation by looking at error rates at trial, the ratio of wrongful convictions obtained through trials versus plea bargains, and the percentage of cases resolved through pleas. Combining empirically based estimates for each of these three factors, a reasonable (and possibly overstated) calculation of the wrongful conviction rate appears, tentatively, to be somewhere in the range of 0.016%–0.062%—a range that comfortably embraces Justice Scalia’s often- criticized figure.

If this Article’s tentative error-rate range is correct, it means that previous scholarship has significantly overstated the risk of wrongful conviction. Moreover, it is possible to compare the lifetime risk of being wrongfully convicted to the risk of being a victim of a violent crime. The relative risk ratio appears to be about 30,000 to 1. This decidedly skewed ratio suggests that reform measures for protecting the innocent may need to be cautiously assessed to ensure that they do not interfere with the important goal of prosecuting the guilty.

谷歌同志一秒鐘完工譯文：

誇大了的美國錯誤定罪率？

重新評估關於錯誤定罪普遍存在的傳統智慧

60 ARIZ。 L. REV。 815（2018）

PAUL G. CASSELL文章查看PDF

越來越多的學術文獻討論了錯誤定罪的問題，即對事實上無辜的被告人沒有犯下罪行而定罪。但是，這種流產實際上是多久發生一次呢？斯卡利亞大法官（Scala）指出錯誤率為0.027％。但是文獻中的傳統觀點是，對於暴力犯罪，錯誤率要高得多-至少為1％，甚至可能高達4％甚至更高。

這篇文章對那種傳統觀念提出了質疑。在仔細閱讀現有經驗文獻的基礎上，可以通過查看審判時的錯誤率，通過審判獲得的錯誤定罪的比率與辯訴交易的比率以及案件的百分比來組合錯誤定罪率計算的組成部分。通過懇求解決。結合對這三個因素中每個因素的基於經驗的估計，對錯誤定罪率的合理（可能過高估計）的計算值暫定在0.016％-0.062％的範圍內，這個範圍可以輕鬆地涵蓋Scalia法官通常-被批評的人物。

如果本文的初步錯誤率範圍正確，則意味着以前的獎學金已大大高估了錯誤定罪的風險。此外，有可能將一生中被錯誤定罪的風險與成為暴力犯罪受害者的風險進行比較。相對危險度似乎是30,000：1。這個絕對偏斜的比率表明，可能需要謹慎評估保護無辜者的改革措施，以確保它們不會干擾起訴有罪罪行的重要目標。

全文鏈接：

https://arizonalawreview.org/pdf/60-4/60arizlrev815.pdf