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.

谷歌同志一秒钟完工译文：

夸大了的美国错误定罪率？

重新评估关于错误定罪普遍存在的传统智慧

60 ARIZ。 L. REV。 815（2018）

PAUL G. CASSELL文章查看PDF

越来越多的学术文献讨论了错误定罪的问题，即对事实上无辜的被告人没有犯下罪行而定罪。但是，这种流产实际上是多久发生一次呢？斯卡利亚大法官（Scala）指出错误率为0.027％。但是文献中的传统观点是，对于暴力犯罪，错误率要高得多-至少为1％，甚至可能高达4％甚至更高。

这篇文章对那种传统观念提出了质疑。在仔细阅读现有经验文献的基础上，可以通过查看审判时的错误率，通过审判获得的错误定罪的比率与辩诉交易的比率以及案件的百分比来组合错误定罪率计算的组成部分。通过恳求解决。结合对这三个因素中每个因素的基于经验的估计，对错误定罪率的合理（可能过高估计）的计算值暂定在0.016％-0.062％的范围内，这个范围可以轻松地涵盖Scalia法官通常-被批评的人物。

如果本文的初步错误率范围正确，则意味着以前的奖学金已大大高估了错误定罪的风险。此外，有可能将一生中被错误定罪的风险与成为暴力犯罪受害者的风险进行比较。相对危险度似乎是30,000：1。这个绝对偏斜的比率表明，可能需要谨慎评估保护无辜者的改革措施，以确保它们不会干扰起诉有罪罪行的重要目标。

全文链接：

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