Comment by jyounker
1 day ago
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.
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...
Shouldn't the denominator be the number of people actually executed ? 691 in the last 20 years, for instance ?
it doesn't matter if it's 29 or 2900. Even 1 is wrong.
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.
"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?
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.
> 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.
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?
The 10% claim has been refuted.
2 replies →
Why would you expect those cases to have lower rates of false conviction than normal cases?
Hoo boy, welcome to the history of the United states.