Counting innocent men in prison impossible

flashl

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Tue Mar-25-08 05:16 PM
Original message

Counting innocent men in prison impossible

NEW YORK, March 25 (UPI) -- Criminology experts agree that it is virtually impossible to accurately estimate how many innocent people are locked up in U.S. prisons.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said a couple of years ago that the best estimate was .027 percent wrongly incarcerated based on calculations from an Oregon prosecutor.

The New York Times Tuesday said an article in the upcoming Annual Review of Law and Social Science takes issue with the Oregon calculations, contending they were overly broad. The article points out that the figure is derived by basically dividing the number of exonerated prisoners in the United States by the total number of felony convictions.

The Oregon prosecutor, Joshua Marquis of Clatsop County, told the Times that while the prisoners exonerated were nearly all in for rape or murder, there are no figures for exonerations on burglary and other felonies that would firm up the numbers.

UPI

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slackmaster

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Tue Mar-25-08 05:18 PM
Response to Original message

1. I'm having a "Deja-Huh?" on this one

If we knew exactly how many innocent people were in prison, couldn't we release them and bring the number to zero?

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angrycarpenter

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Tue Mar-25-08 05:31 PM
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3. No, look at Siegelman

there are a lot of people in jail simply because some cop or judge wants them there.

Can you imagine the mass freak-out if they just let the thousands of innocent black men out? Innocent or not the conservatives would shit their pants in fear.

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ThomCat

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Thu Apr-03-08 02:05 AM
Response to Reply #1

5. I wish that were so.

But a hell of a lot of prosecutors don't seem to care that people are innocent. They need convictions, and by God they're determined to get them and make them stick.
x(

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LoveHC

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Tue Mar-25-08 05:28 PM
Response to Original message

2. Everybody in prison is innocent

Seriously, just ask them.

Actually, .027 will admit they're guilty. So what, I "embellished", I'm human.

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flashl

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Tue Mar-25-08 10:20 PM
Response to Reply #2

4. Have you heard of the Innocent Project? or the recent $20M torture suit against the Chicago PD?

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