Comment by radicaldreamer

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

[dead]

An old phone book is enough.