From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Wed Jul 31 2002 - 15:39:01 MDT
On Wednesday, July 31, 2002, at 08:14 am, Charlie Stross wrote:
> Coming at this a bit late -- the UK has a legal system derived from the
> same roots as the US system, so it's probably fair to extrapolate from
> the UK to the US. Over the past decade, a criminal review body has been
> subjecting evidence relating to previous murder convictions to DNA
> testing in an attempt to reduce the proportion of contentious decisions.
> The false positive error rate in capital convictions between 1945 and
> 1964 (when capital punishment in the UK was suspended) appears to have
> been a steady 10%. Thus, roughly 10% of those executed in the UK over
> that period were innocents convicted in error.
>
> Since 1970, the recidivism rate for murderers released after a life
> sentence was served ran at roughly 1.5%.
>
> So, it seems logical that if the UK had retained the death penalty, it
> would have executed ten times as many innocents as would have been saved
> from murderers.
I hope the U.S. is at or below that level, but it could be higher. We
have had scandals in Oklahoma City where I worked for a while, and down
in Florida where I live. These scandals involve finding incompetent
crime lab workers who either faked evidence or just made up results
without performing the tests they were supposed to do. In both cases,
hundreds of cases were called into question, many of them involving
defendants on death row. We also have been having an epidemic of DNA
tests exonerating people. Not to mention the epidemic of corrupt police
officers planting evidence or corrupt prosecutors doing whatever it
takes to win their case and put away the person they are so sure is
guilty. I am sure that everyone has heard that the state of Illinois
has supsended all executions because the governor recently decided that
he might be putting more innocent people to death than guilty ones. It
would not surprise me at all to learn that 10% of the executions in this
country have been of innocent people.
-- Harvey Newstrom, CISSP <www.HarveyNewstrom.com> Principal Security Consultant <www.Newstaff.com>
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