I can't think of anything adequate. If there was prosecution/police malfeasance, one could sue. Barring that, what would suffice? Some things are just not reparable.

How do you reclaim lost years of your life?

A currenlt report by the Woolf Comittee suggests that nearly 5% of all cases heard in the UK are enroneous. They suggested that this figure wa sin line with the res tof the world.

therefore one in 20 people killed in the US was inncoent of what they were killed for.


Neon

First of all, how does a POLL establish a false incarceration rate in the UK?

Second, how can they possibly extrapolate to the rest of the world, with completely different CJS?

No, that simply doesn't follow at all. The process is completely different and the bar much higher in capital cases. Some small number of people are wrongly convicted in US capital cases, but so far no one has been able to show anyone was wrongly executed.

Why? Because execution does not rapidly follow conviction. In most states, an appeal is automatically filed as a matter of procedure. Typically, appeal after appeal is filed, and every molecule of the case scrutinized over and over by different judges, in a process that often spans decades.

The fact is that the only countries which use the adversdarial system of Justice are England, Austrailia, Canada and the U.S.

Secondly, the report only showed that the cases which had a higher (jury) trial.

thirdly the use of the word Poll was incorrect on my part and should have read 'report' (it has been subsequently ammended).

In most cases in the UK an appeal is filed as an automatic proceedural point. The fact of the matter is that wether the US is better or worse then the UK, it still miscarries justice about 5% of the time throughout the whole process.

Therefore out of every 20 men killed approx 1 of them is innocent.

Then why talk about "the rest of the world" when they only meant "the other 3 countries?"

The fact of the matter is that wether the US is better or worse then the UK, it still miscarries justice about 5% of the time throughout the whole process.

That's simply an unsupported assertion. Error rates in two countries have no reason to be the same, and certainly not until you PROVE that.

Therefore out of every 20 men killed approx 1 of them is innocent.

As stated, you are simply wrong, since execution is not just conviction but is conviction plus innumerable appeals.

Since you refused to even recognize, much less address, this point, we can't make progress in this debate. Your rather silly non sequitur fails the laugh test.

I doubt it is 1 in 20, for the reason that dgg9 states, but then, while it may well be that no case of an execution of an innocent man has been recorded, I highly doubt that it has never happened. Mere common sense suggests that it does happen, however many appeals you have. Once someone is dead the case is closed, so that is the verdict that will almost always remain on the books officially. Hardly surprsing then that no such case has ever been recorded. In fact, it has happened in the UK that people have been pardoned many years after execution, but the circumstances leading to these are convoluted and haphazard, so doubtless there are many that have gone undetected.

But there are anti-DP advocacy groups, muckraking journalists, relatives of the executed, etc, who all have a stake in posthumous exoneration. If there were anything there, we would think they would have found something.

Despite this, is it possible for the wrong man to be executed? Sure. However, there is still cost/benefit, which no one wants to weigh. In reality, you can never have perfection. The balance between letting guilty go free and overzealous prosecution punishing the innocent has to be set somerhere, and anywhere you place the fulcrum, there is a cost. The price of outrageously tilting the balance towards "never convict the innocent" means more of the guilty go free, and they cause crimes, kill people etc. The death toll of innocents is not zero, then.

This is true even when, rather than the DP, the alternative is life in prison. Because even then, convicted murderers often kill other inmates and prison guards. Sometimes they escape. Their continued existence on Earth is a danger to everyone else, to some degree.

That being said, I agree that the DP should be reserved for those cases meeting some objective criteria for proof, such as DNA evidence, where the risk of wrongful conviction is deemed miniscule.

Here's an article I found on the subject which blows my 5% figures out of the water. Although in all fairness this is a more specific study of the direct subject matter.

68 Percent Error Rate Found in Death Case Study
Author calls serious problems 'epidemic'
Marcia Coyle
The National Law Journal
June 9, 2000


In the past two decades, federal and state courts have overturned 68 percent of the death sentences they have reviewed because of serious errors in their trials, according to a new study. And in cases sent back for retrials, 82 percent of convicted capital defendants received new sentences that were other than death -- including 7 percent who were found innocent.
"This study is designed to look at the system and how common mistakes are," says its author, law professor James S. Liebman, of Columbia University. "What we've found is it's not one state, it's not one case, but it's the system in which this kind of serious error is epidemic."

The study defines "serious error" as error that "substantially undermines the reliability of the guilt finding or death sentence imposed at trial" and that led a court to overturn the conviction, the sentence or both.

When the 68 percent overall error rate is broken down into its state and federal components, the study, which covers the period from 1973 to 1995, reports:

• Of 599 death sentences finally reviewed in their first federal habeas corpus petitions, federal courts overturned 40 percent, or 237, because of serious error.

• Of the 4,578 death sentences finally reviewed by state high courts on direct appeal, 41 percent, or 1,885, were thrown out because of serious error. When that rate is combined with sentences overturned at the next stage -- state post-conviction proceedings -- state courts found serious error in 47 percent of death sentences.

• Of 26 states that had at least one case move through the three stages of state and federal review, 24 had overall error rates of 52 percent or more.

• Two errors trigger the majority of reversals at the state post-conviction stage: "egregiously" incompetent defense lawyers who overlook evidence of actual innocence or evidence supporting a lesser sentence, and prosecutorial or police suppression of such evidence.

NOT A SUCCESS

In the end, the study concludes, few death sentences succeed, and it takes roughly 10 years for the courts to decide each one. From 1973 to 1995, states imposed 5,760 death sentences and carried out 313 executions -- 5.4 percent, or one in 19.

By that measure, the study says, capital punishment is not a success.

The 68 percent error rate -- which shows little fluctuation over 23 years -- is a "stunning number," says longtime death penalty scholar Ira Robbins, of American University Washington College of Law. It suggests that execution of the innocent -- the current public and legislative concern in the death penalty debate -- is not the only problem, he says.

"Whether or not the politicians agree, the courts are also reversing for serious constitutional errors," he says. "Legal innocence is still very important in the eyes of the courts."

The high error rates, Robbins says, show that "something is fundamentally wrong with the way the death penalty is administered in this country."

At least one proponent of the current system sees the error rate differently.

"The U.S. Supreme Court has said we're going to have super due process for death penalty cases," says law professor Paul Cassell, of the University of Utah, "and so it's not surprising that when you impose more process, you see more reversals. The death penalty system in America is the most accurate criminal sanction in the world."

Liebman, who also has represented capital defendants before the U.S. Supreme Court, counters, "If somebody came to you and said, 'I've got the perfect system. It's designed to make mistakes and catch them well,' I don't think most Americans want to pay for that kind of a system."

Beth Wilkinson, a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Latham & Watkins and a former Oklahoma City bombing prosecutor, says, "What really troubles me is not just the 68 percent, but the 82 percent of people who, after error was discovered, received a sentence less than death. It shows me not only are there errors, but that most of these cases appear to not have been death penalty or death-eligible cases to begin with."

The study, "A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases," began in 1991, after the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee asked for data on the frequency of habeas relief granted in capital cases. The study's release falls on the eve of a Senate Judiciary hearing on death penalty legislation, including DNA testing in alleged-innocence cases.

The findings appear to dispel some old and recent notions about capital appeals.

Because of releases from Illinois' death row and the Illinois governor's moratorium on executions, it's been suggested that Illinois has more than its share of death penalty errors. But its rate was 66 percent, slightly less than average.

Litigators have long believed that federal courts offer greater protection than state courts, whose elected judges are seen as vulnerable to political pressures. However, of the 2,370 death sentences reversed by state courts, 90 percent were overturned by elected judges.

That figure, Liebman cautions, doesn't mean that federal review is unnecessary. Federal courts still reversed 40 percent of the cases passed through by state courts.

Finally, states with the highest rates of death sentencing don't have correspondingly high execution rates. Louisiana, Virginia, Missouri and Texas have low death sentencing but high execution rates. Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi have high sentencing rates but low execution rates. Finding the reasons will be part of the study's next phase, says Liebman.

The study gives the first broad picture of state courts in capital appeals, says law professor Franklin E. Zimring, of the University of California at Berkeley.

He says that he is struck by the "enormous, inexplicable and much scarier" state courts variance in error-finding.

"If you've been sentenced to death, your odds of error-finding in a state appellate court vary from 1 in 10 to 9 in 10, depending upon what state you're in," he says. In Virginia, he notes, 90 percent of all capital cases are error-free, according to its Supreme Court, but in North Carolina, only 39 percent are passed on as error-free.

Virginia is at variance not only among the death-sentencing states, but also within the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Its state court error rates on direct appeals range from Virginia's low of 10 percent to 61 percent in North Carolina.

The circuit itself has found reversible error in 15 percent of capital habeas cases -- the lowest error-detection rate among the nine circuits that conducted habeas review during the study period.

The other circuits and their error rates on habeas were the 6th (100 percent, two cases), 9th (62 percent), 11th (50 percent), 10th (47 percent), 7th (43 percent), 8th (33 percent), 5th (32 percent) and 3rd (29 percent).

Kent Scheidegger, of the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, in Sacramento, Calif., argues that high reversal rates result from "turmoil in the law" and not deficiencies in trial courts.

"Nobody can conduct a trial 'right' when 'right' isn't defined until years after the trial is over," he says. The Supreme Court, he notes, disagreed from year to year from the 1970s to the mid-1980s over what the Constitution requires. And, he adds, sometimes a reversal is due to an appellate court's previously reversing a valid judgment. "This is particularly true in the 9th Circuit," he says.

But Wilkinson and habeas scholar Larry Yackle, of Boston University School of Law, believe the study will withstand scrutiny and should affect the debate. "What Congress, and in large measure the Supreme Court, have done with the death penalty is to add procedural complexity that, I guess, is meant to speed things up, but in fact has slowed things down," says Yackle. "I don't think anything they have done in the last 20 or so years has done anything to seriously enhance our ability to avoid these errors."

http://www.truthinjustice.org/68percent.htm

This is more then a little cocnerning, if the fact is that the death penalty has such a varying degree in its application, then why use it. Statesm can't seem to agree on the correct proceedures to apply and when to apply them.

I'll look for more hard based facts of Post-mortum pardons

Neon

In the DP controversy, it's important not to take the sweeping claims made by "studies" at face value. When researchers have a pre-destined agenda, it's easy to produce tendentious results.

For example, in a DP case, it is very common for an appellate court to ask for additional findings from the trial court, get the findings, then uphold the verdict. So if ANY court at ANY stage of the case returns the case back down a level for more information or procedural verification, your study counts that as a "mistake" rather than admirable diligence and due process.

In addition, many of the DP reversals were for purely ideological grounds, having nothing to do with the facts of the case. The notorious justice Rose Bird single-handedly accounted for about half of California's DP reversals, IIRC, and she openly and candidly admitted she didn't care about the facts of the case. She was a liberal activist judge who was against the DP, so routinely reversed all DP cases. So that's half of California's "error rate" right there.

Also, the Liebman study inexcusably mixes reversals of convictions with reversals of sentences. E.g., a man clearly guilty might have his DP sentence reversed, but since his life in prison sentence still holds, prosecutors may decide not to undergo the cost and risk of retrial. But this should not be confused with a reversal of conviction, where someone is found not guilty of the charges themselves and freed. But the study adds them in to artifically inflate and sensationalize the numbers.

http://www.ncpa.org/pi/crime/pd061600c.html

http://www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/docs/latzer.htm

Many more mistakes occur in trials than we might think - whether these mistakes lead to innocence is doubtful (the Jayson Williams' defendants tried pushing for a mistrial because the prosecution forgot to give them some pictures ('evidence') before the trial).