What we know about the falsely convicted isn’t much, says Michigan Law professor Samuel R. Gross, who suggests it happens on a regular basis.
Gross examines what we do and don’t know in his paper “Convicting the Innocent,” forthcoming in the Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences. What we know comes mainly from people exonerated by DNA testing in the most violent of crimes. “Over 95% of the individual exonerations that we know about are in murder or rape cases, which together account for about 2% of all felony convictions, and a smaller proportion of all criminal convictions,” Gross writes.
This leads to what Gross calls “absurd” calculations of the efficiency of our legal system that make their way to U.S. Supreme Court. Gross cites Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in the Kansas v. Michael Marsh case where he concluded criminal convictions “have an “error rate of .027 percent –or, to put it another way, a success rate of 99.973 percent”.”
“Given what we knew by 2006, the charitable explanation for such an assertion is self deception,” Gross writes.
The main reason for false convictions: mistaken eye-witness identification, witnesses lying on the stand and people who confess to crimes they didn’t commit. Gross even finds evidence that some people are convicted of crimes that never even occurred — from falsely reported rapes to police planting drugs.