The study is available at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"More Innocent People on Death Row Than Estimated: Study," is by David Von Drehle for Time.
“False convictions … are extremely difficult to detect after the fact,” law professors Samuel R. Gross of the University of Michigan and Barbara O’Brien of Michigan State write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal. “As a result, the great majority of innocent defendants remain undetected. The rate of such errors is often described as a ‘dark figure’.”
But by applying statistical models derived from the study of medicine and mortality, the authors assert that “it possible to use data on death row exonerations to estimate the overall rate of false conviction among death sentences.” Two experts in biostatistics, Chen Hu of the American College of Radiology and Edward H. Kennedy of the University of Pennsylvania, crunched the data with that goal in mind.
“This study provides the first rigorous estimate of the rate of conviction of innocent criminal defendants in any context,” said Bruce Levin, a Columbia University professor who is a leading authority on statistics and the law. It could add fuel to the slowly rising misgivings of Americans about the practice and flaws of capital punishment in the U.S.
Al Jazeera America reports, "Report: Over 4 percent of U.S. death row inmates innocent," by Massoud Hayoun.
Most death row defendants’ sentences — likely close to two-thirds — are either commuted to life imprisonment or somehow overturned. But once inmates are taken off death row, they are less than one-tenth as likely to be exonerated, according to the report.
That’s because media, civil society and legal groups tend to spend more resources on death row inmates than people whose sentences have been reduced to life in prison, lead author on the report and University of Michigan law professor Samuel R. Gross told Al Jazeera.
“If we were to invest the effort by judges, prosecutors, journalists — if the entire system were as worried and upset to prevent people from being executed as they were to prevent people from being in prison for their entire lives, we’d find many more who are innocent,” Gross said.
"How Many Innocent People Are Sentenced To Death?" is by Elizabeth Lopatto at Forbes.
The data on people sentenced to die can’t be generalized to other crimes, because capital murder cases are handled differently even from other murder cases. However, the researchers point out that many of the people who are resentenced from death to life in prison may be innocent and rotting behind bars, since without the imminent threat of death, no one will take up their case to exonerate them.
“The great majority of innocent defendants who are convicted of capital murder in the United States are neither exeuted nor exonerated,” the authors wrote. “They are sentenced, or resentenced to prison for life, and then forgotten.”
The ABA Journal posts, "Study: Scalia was wrong; about 1 in 25 people sentenced to death are likely innocent," by Debra Cassens Weiss.
Death sentences represent less than one-tenth of 1 percent of prison sentences in the United States, but they accounted for about 12 percent of known exonerations of innocent defendants from 1989 to 2012, the study says.
And:
"Since 1973, nearly 8,500 defendants have been sentenced to death in the United States, and 138 of them have been exonerated," Gross said in the press release. "Our study means that more than 200 additional innocent defendants have been sentenced to death in that period. Most of these undiscovered innocent capital defendants have been resentenced to life in prison, and then forgotten."
AP spoke with statistics experts for their take on the findings. Yale University biostatistics expert Theodore Holford said the study "seems to be a reasonable way to look at these data." University of South Carolina statistics professor John Grego said it might be better to take the study’s margin of error into account, which would mean the innocence rate is probably between 2.8 percent and 5.2 percent.
The study refutes a statement made by Justice Antonin Scalia in a concurring opinion in 2007. He wrote that American criminal convictions have an error rate of 0.027 percent “or, to put it another way, a success rate of 99.973 percent.”
"Hundreds of prisoners on death row were wrongfully convicted," is by Dina Fine Meron for Scientific American. It's via Salon.com.
Just how many individuals on death row are incorrectly convicted? The question has dogged attorneys and civil rights advocates for years, but a simple answer is almost impossible because few wrongful cases are ever overturned. A new analysis is adding a level of much-needed detail, and it concludes that more than twice as many inmates were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death than have been exonerated and freed.
Borrowing a statistical method often used to evaluate whether new medical therapies help patients survive, a team of researchers has concluded that about 4.1 percent of criminal defendants who are sentenced to death are falsely convicted. The approach allows researchers to “actually come up with a valid estimate of the rate of false convictions—knowing something that people say [in criminal justice] is not knowable,” says study author Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School and editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, a U.S.-focused exoneration database. What makes the analysis possible is that data on the potential need for exoneration from death penalty cases come to light more often than it does for other types of criminal proceedings. All death sentences in the U.S. are based on crimes that include homicide.
The study, led by a team of lawyers and statisticians, examined data on both 7,482 defendants who were given death sentences between 1973 and 2004 and death row exonerations during that time. By applying survival analysis—a statistical method often used to calculate how well new treatments help patients survive—they determined how often a prisoner under threat of execution was exonerated.
"False convictions Study: More innocent people sentenced to death than exonerated," is by Frank Green of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
In Virginia, only former death row inmate Earl Washington Jr., who came within days of execution in a 1982 rape and murder in Culpeper, has been exonerated.
Washington’s death sentence was commuted to life in 1994 when DNA testing first cast doubt on his guilt. Then in 2000, Washington was granted an absolute pardon when further testing cleared him and implicated the real killer.
"Shocking Number Of Innocent People Sentenced To Death, Study Finds," by Michael McLaughlin at HuffPost.
The four authors reviewed the outcomes of the 7,482 death sentences handed down from 1973 to 2004. Of that group, 117, or 1.6 percent, were exonerated.
But with enough time and resources, the authors concluded that at least 4.1 percent of death row inmates would have been exonerated. In other words, more than 200 other prisoners would have been cleared during those three decades.
They arrived at that number using survival analysis, a statistics tool commonly used in medicine to evaluate the effectiveness of new treatments.
“This impressive study points to a serious flaw in our use of the death penalty,” said Richard Dieter, Death Penalty Information Center executive director, after seeing the report. “The ‘problem of innocence’ is much worse than was thought."
"Study Says Hundreds of Prisoners Sentenced to Death Were Probably Innocent," by Danielle Wiener-Bronner at the Wire.
About 4.1 percent of those who were sentenced to death between 1973 and 2004, or about 300 people, are likely innocent, according to new analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.
Earlier coverage of the innocence study begins at the link.
Comments