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"Speeders & Drunk Drivers are MURDERERS" <xeton2...@yahoo.com> wrote...

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http://abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/06/28/1965094.htm?section=world

US juries get verdict wrong in one of six cases: study
AFP
Published: Thursday June 28, 2007
So much for US justice: juries get the verdict wrong in one out of six
criminal cases and judges don't do much better, a new study has found.

And when they make those mistakes, both judges and juries are far more
likely to send an innocent person to jail than to let a guilty person go
free, according to an upcoming study out of Northwestern University.

(snip)

The study, which looked at 290 non-capital criminal cases in four major
cities from 2000 to 2001, is the first to examine the accuracy of modern
juries and judges in the United States.

So what PROOF did they use to say that innocent were convicted? Did the
people doing this study have better evidence that what was presented in
court? What did they base their whole premise of wrongful conviction on?

See:http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2007/06/juries.html
<begin quote>
To conduct the study, Spencer employed a replication analysis of jury
verdicts, comparing decisions of actual jurors with decisions of judges
who were hearing the cases they were deciding. In other words, as a jury
was deliberating about a particular verdict, its judge filled out a
questionnaire giving what he or she believed to be the correct verdict.
"Consider the analogy to sample surveys, where sampling error is
estimated even though the true value may never be known," Spencer said.
"The key is replication. To assess the accuracy of jury verdicts, we
need a second opinion of what the verdict should be."
By comparing agreement rates of judges and juries over time and across
jurisdictions, and even across types of cases, Spencer's statistical
analysis could give insights into the comparative accuracy of verdicts
in different sets of cases.
...
The agreement rate was 77 percent in the NCSC study and 80 percent for
the earlier study. Allowing for chance agreement, the agreement rates
were not high....A key assumption of Spencer's study is that, on
average, the judge's verdict is at least as likely to be correct as the
jury's verdict.
Without assumptions, a 77 percent agreement rate could reflect 100
percent accuracy by the judge and 77 percent accuracy by the jury, or
100 percent accuracy by the jury and 77 percent accuracy by the judge,
or 88 percent accuracy by both, or even 50 percent accuracy by both if
they often agreed on the incorrect verdict.
<end quote>

Studies in which guilt or innocence could be definitively determined by
DNA evidence or some other definitive means found similarly high rates
of conviction of innocent persons. (See _Actual Innocence_ Dwyer,
Scheck, Neufeld, New York: Doubleday, 2000, for example)

We have a legal system that routinely--or at least very often--acquits
the guilty and convicts the innocent. For accounts of the many people
unjustly convicted of child molestation, see _No Crueler Tyrannies:
Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times_
by Dorothy Rabinowitz, Wall Street Journal book, Free Press, NY, NY, 2003- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -