What percentage of people in jail are innocent of their convicted crimes?

[Lunar]

of the *specific* crimes they are convicted of, not being associated with them.

Remember, that innocence can result of many factors:
1) Being framed
2) Refusing to take the fall for a friend
3) An unethical prosecutor
4) A public defender interested in his own "score" that encourages you to you concede to a plea bargain out of fear of being convicted for a longer sentence.
5) Being accused of a crime people hate.  Think of the Duke LaCrosse team but where the accuser isn't a bipolar prostitute with no evidence and constant conflicting testimony. 
6) Other factors?

Note that #4 isn't uncommon.  I remember Michael Moore made some initial fame before his was famous, in my rural county in California where he exposed a disgusting system of forcing plea bargains upon innocent defendants.  Not that he's a good person himself or anything.

[Lunar]

One out of twenty people being denied their rights and shoved in a cell with essentially dog food seems pretty bad, so I hope it's less than 5%

Personally, I'm interested in a possible followup question, asking what is to be done even if it's as high as 1%.

[Lunar]

I guess you're right.

1% is unacceptable if there is anything bureaucratically systemic about it.  But if it is just human mistakes then, meh, ok.  I suppose that's the product of having a truly talented government prosecutor, human bias, people exploiting the system, among other things.


I guess when I posted that I was thinking of the death penalty.  I always get disgusted whenever someone is let off of Death Row because DNA evidence proves them innocent all along.  It makes you wonder what was going on before DNA evidence (a systemic flaw).  But yeah I'm pretty sure I agree.

[Lunar]

I've actually debated starting a thread, which I still may do, about what adequate compensation would be for spending 20-30 years on death row, only to be found innocent all along.  It's such a hard punishment to monetize because you could have progressed so much in some career during that time.

Everyone knows what happened before the 1980s or so when they discovered DNA evidence.  God knows how people will look back on these decades and their evidence-collecting abilities, but I doubt it'll be favorable

[Lunar]

I suppose it's another, but fascinating, question as to what the percentage of innocent people on death row is.

I wonder what future technologies like DNA will show us how wrong we were.

[Lunar]

In approximately 75% of the cases where people are taken off death row, the innocent people put there got into that situation because of false witness testimony.

Deliberately false?  Regardless, way too many lay people overvalue personal recounting - it's amazing how differently two people under duress can describe an identical situation.  And do you just mean that false testimony was involved somewhere in the trial?

[Lunar]

Moral of the story? You're screwed if you're mixed-race.