quote:Originally posted by zippadeedoodah:
Just like with OJ, right, SittinPurdy?
I think most rational people know OJ is guilty, but factors outside of the evidence contributed to his acquittal. The defense attorneys did a fine job in getting the jury they wanted -- a jury that wouldn't let a black man be convicted by the evil white L.A. cops. It also didn't help the prosecution that the Rodney King incident happened in LA just a few years prior. There was a lot of racial tension in that city then. But this is really beside the point and not relevant to DNA.
quote:As far as the statistics on the people DNA evidence has cleared after having spent years in prison, have YOU seen them?
I have seen the statistics of "The Innocence Project" who releases the number of successful exonerations they have been involved with. Here is an excerpt from a website dealing with this issue:
quote:Last year’s best-seller Actual Innocence by Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld and Jim Dwyer suggested the true rate of wrongful convictions may be closer to ten percent than to one-half of one percent. DNA tests used before trial have exonerated at least 5000 prime suspects out of the first 18,000 DNA suspect samples at the FBI and other crime labs-suggesting a pre-trial error rate of more than 25 percent. Since 1977, some 553 people have been executed in the United States while another eighty death row inmates have been released after they were found innocent. For every seven executed, one innocent person is freed-an “error rate” of more than twelve (12) percent. In the State of Illinois, 12 people have been executed since 1977 while 13 have been released after proving their innocence-an error rate of 52 percent.
link: http://www.caught.net/innoc.htm
Not too promising for all of those "criminals" who some want to chop the hands and peckers off of, eh?
It's probably fair to say that the error rate with murder convictions is around 10%, if not higher. The error rate for other crimes is likely much higher than 10%.
quote:And usually those cases are not the result of overzealous police; rather, someone lied or the defendant convicted himself with his mouth.
I don't deny that. Eyewitness testimony, for example, is horribly unreliable, especially when the witness is attempting to identify someone they have never met before. There have been many studies on the eyewitness issue, and a Google search should bring up many sites dealing with it.
The same goes for polygraph exams. Many experts say that the error rate for false positives is as high as 25-30%, and that's before taking into account all of the techniques out there for beating the test. Too often the Police will "rule out" an initial suspect because he passed the polygraph. This could be a mistake just as often as it is when they focus in on someone who "failed" it but was really innocent.
The point is, the appeals process is necessary if for no other reason than that too many innocent people are convicted. The same argument could be used against the death penalty in general.