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Counting the Innocent: A discussion of estmates

By Gritsforbreakfast

As the number of exonerated Texans mount, the media and courts have begun to indulge in speculation as to just how many more actually innocent people might be locked up, both in Texas and elsewhere across the country.The United States has less than 5% of the planet's population but 25% of the earth's prisoners. When you deal in that kind of unprecedented volume, after a while, mistakes inevitably get made.The debate was set off officially some time ago when SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia cited an estimate by Astoria, Oregon District Attorney Josh Marquis, who calculated in an op ed that the system enjoyed a 99.973 percent accuracy rate. In other words, he estimated the wrong person was convicted only .027% of the time.See this blog post by Marquis explaining his estimate's methodology, in which he took an academic's running tally of exonerations, multiplied by a factor of ten, then compared it to total felony convictions to get this infinitesimal ratio...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on May 06, 2008 (boomark / email).