[cadamsdotcom]

> large double-digit percentage

This is a very very intense claim, and if true, would represent a monumental institutional failure across hundreds or even thousands of disparate organizations.

Do you have any data to support your hunch?

Strong claims require strong evidence.

[jyounker]

When DNA matching was introduced, we discovered that at minimum 10% of people on death row were innocent. Death row cases are among the most litigated and examined cases. So, 10% is a reasonable floor, and we're already in double digits.

[pseudo0]

That stat is off by a couple orders of magnitude. The total number of death penalty convictions overturned by DNA evidence is 29 (as of 2025). There are a couple thousand death row inmates right now, and the denominator here is all the people who were on death row in the last 20+ years. That's a rate of significantly <1%.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/first-death-row-exoneration-inv...

[golem14]

Shouldn't the denominator be the number of people actually executed ? 691 in the last 20 years, for instance ?

[bouncycastle]

it doesn't matter if it's 29 or 2900. Even 1 is wrong.

[wyldberry]

The commenter isn't litigating that claim, they are litigating the claim that at least 1 out of 10 of those on death row were false.

[jasonfarnon]

"we discovered that at minimum 10% of people on death row were innocent"

How did we do that? I never heard this: certainly 10% of people on death row weren't exonerated by DNA? This is some kind of shaky extrapolation I assume?

[themafia]

When they choose the "DNA loci" to do SRT "matching" in the first place they convinced themselves it was a unique fingerprint and there never would be any duplicates in the database.

It only took a few years.

They've since changed and expanded the standard "DNA loci" to compensate.

[peyton]

> This reasonably sets a floor

I disagree wrt reasonableness. It’s just too big a leap. There are a lot of crimes, and not many land you on death row.

[brookst]

The observation was that death row represents the highest level of scrutiny, and still had 10% false positives for guilt.

Is there any argument that less-scrutinized cases would have a lower level of false convictions?

[bluGill]

The 10% claim has been refuted.

[brookst]

What % is it?

[bluGill]

Read other replies. I don't think we have enough data to give an opinion exact number but less than 1

[jyounker]

Why would you expect those cases to have lower rates of false conviction than normal cases?

[halestock]

Hoo boy, welcome to the history of the United states.

[smallmancontrov]

A few years ago, one of my coworkers was arrested for a domestic violence complaint. Looking into his case, I found an extremely specific lurid description of the allegations -- and then I found the same lurid description copy/pasted to every other person recently arrested for the same crime. I'm probably getting the specific terms wrong, but I did click through to see it on a government website, because my first suspicion was the aggregator, but no, the police just had a boilerplate story full of specifics which could not possibly apply to each and every person they carelessly slapped it onto. This absolutely blew my mind at the time, but it fits with smaller subsequent observations. In any case: a double digit percentage of institutional failure does not upset my priors about how carefully the police operate.

[assimpleaspossi]

The complaint would be by the courts, not the police.

[gerdesj]

Why did you "look into the case of your coworker"?

[ceejayoz]

You wouldn't be curious?

[xstas1]

Can you put some of the text in a comment here?

[rvnx]

Shouldn't it be the exact opposite here ? The burden of proof is the other way around.

The big claim is here: the state has grandiose claims that the overwhelming majority is fair, but there is no proof of it.

Therefore the state should prove that more than 90% of the cases are legitimate, fair, not coerced, and not motivated by the pressure to interrupt the proceedings.

97% of people choose plea deals or out-of-court settlement, it is a huge amount.

It means that in real practice, not imaginary internet, people who face court consider that justice is a big machine that can crush you no matter if you are innocent or not.

In the best case you are acquitted at the end, but you are guaranteed to bear the financial burden, fear and stress as a punishment.

Being held in jail before trial is a very convincing reason to plea deal too.

It's a system engineered to make pleading the only reasonable option, no matter if you did anything or not.

[jasonfarnon]

That is true--the checks and balances the founding fathers fought so hard for were thrown out the window with overlegislation and expansion of prosecutorial discretion in 20th century. To make a convincing argument that "double digits" of cases involve fabricated evidence, you still need to explain why prosecutors would engage in fraud at this massive scale. Just laziness? Collecting scalps? The incentives run that way in some limited cases, e.g., prosecutor up for election, post-reconstruction south. But you need some explanation there.

[inigyou]

They get rewarded based on winning cases?

[jasonfarnon]

Yeah, again, there are some incentives to fabricate evidence like career advancement. Now why should those, on a mass scale, outweigh disincentives like getting caught in an adversarial process and (presumably) some qualm about regularly convicting innocents and regularly letting guilty parties run free in communities. Easy to argue in particular cases but I haven't heard the basis for a trend.

[inigyou]

What adversarial process? If the prosecutor loses the case, the defendant doesn't go to jail but still receives a very big punishment and the prosecutor loses nothing. And prosecutors never prosecute themselves for false prosecution.

[jrflowers]

> (presumably) some qualm

This sounds like you’re imagining how prosecutors as a group sort of feel about things, generally, and that this notion you’ve thought of outweighs the demonstrable real-world system where prosecutors are awarded for convictions, full stop.

[CoastalCoder]

> Shouldn't it be the exact opposite here ? The burden of proof is the other way around

That's the rule for criminal court in the US, but each of us is free to pick his own standard for his own purposes.

[cadamsdotcom]

A burden of proof is associated with an individual claim. There’s no “burden of proof in the other direction” - what you’ve actually done is created a second burden of proof and also - worse - attempted to distract from the original point.

It is disingenuous to weasel out of proving one claim by making another, or saying “look over here”

Also, outrageous claims in opposite directions can both be bullshit.

[godwinson__4-8]

On what basis is it an outrageous claim? You think the number is closer to 0? That sounds like a more outrageous claim to me.

[Jensson]

That is like claiming that double digit percentage of software bugs and vulnerabilities were intentionally put there by malicious software engineers. Its outrageous to claim its that high.

Even single digit percent is hard to believe, but its possible, but double digits you are talking China or Russia levels of state corruption and even there I doubt its that high.

[cadamsdotcom]

~~Please point to the place where I said your claim was outrageous.~~

Edit; upon closer examination. I did imply in my last paragraph that your claim was outrageous. Bit of a gaffe considering I’m the agitator here. My apologies.

[chaps]

An important thing you should recognize: the judicial system is painfully nontransparent in such a way that even figuring this sort of thing takes an extensive amount of time and is often even impossible. I've personally gone down a similar route (did some journalism for a bit) by trying to understand how shotspotter is used in prosecution, many of which resulted in false arrests and many, many years of life lost across all the people arrested falsely from it.

If you would like to begin trying to answer these, I recommend starting with submitting some FOIAs. Considering your stance seems to be that you won't believe what others are telling you -- I promise you that you'll be surprised.

[dpkirchner]

If you believe parallel construction should be illegal (it sure seems like it is unconstitutional to me), then 100% of prosecutions that rely on it are unjust. I don't think anyone truly knows how common it is, though, and that's by design. Double-digits wouldn't shock me at all.

[Arodex]

Police in the United States is already in a state of "institutional failure"...

[cadamsdotcom]

“Police in the United States” is not a monolith.

It’s easy to say things that sound true on the surface, but even if true, it’s still irresponsible to say them on the back of a hunch.

[nixon_why69]

It's more monolithic than you would think due to shared culture over the internet. There's a whole narrative about sheepdogs (them), sheep (us) and wolves (the bad guys).

[lokar]

I don’t know the numbers, but DNA exonerations give a bit of a natural experiment (where testable evidence was preserved).

[jasonfarnon]

They give a floor, and that floor is too small to be useful.

[lokar]

The main obstacle is the denominator. How many conversations were there (before dna testing) where testable tissue was preserved? You would want to test some random sample of them against the person convicted.

[adastra22]

Do you have any exposure to the criminal "justice" system in the USA?

[vitally3643]

We have the highest proportion of imprisoned citizens in the world.

This is done because there's an exception in our constitution for slavery "as punishment for a crime" and well all know that capitalism loves slave labor.

[themafia]

It's actually an institutional success since prison labor is so often utilized in the United States. The truth is they're just lying to you.