![]() According to the researchers, prisoners and other convicted people know their own involvement in their conviction offenses and can presumably relay that for cases ranging from retail theft to murder. Loeffler, Ridgeway, and Hyatt opted to take a second tack: asking the prisoners themselves. On the other, they’re difficult to interpret and generalize does the percentage someone offers include cases he himself tried, those he heard about, those he spoke about with colleagues, or some combination of those options? On the one hand, the results aren’t biased from respondent self-interest. ![]() One asks prosecutors, judges, and others working in the criminal-justice system for their opinion on this rate. There are two approaches to conducting research like this. “Before we did this study, a reasonable response to the question of how many people are wrongfully convicted would be, ‘We don’t know.’ Through this work, we’ve reduced that uncertainty dramatically.” In other words, if people were going to be inaccurate, that would lead us to a true rate that’s lower than, rather than higher than, 6 percent,” Loeffler says. “We view this as an upper-bound estimate. ![]() This is one of the first estimates of its kind for the criminal-justice population as a whole. Surveying an intake population of nearly 3,000 state prisoners in Pennsylvania, the researchers found that 6 percent reported being wrongfully convicted, results the team published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology in April. So he shaped a study with Jordan Hyatt, now at Drexel University but formerly a research associate at Penn, and Penn criminologist Greg Ridgeway. New evidence comes to light that wasn’t available during the original trial, and someone previously found guilty of a crime is suddenly cleared.įor capital crimes such as murder and rape, this happens in approximately 3 to 5 percent of cases, but Penn criminologist Charles Loeffler realized there was no such estimate for other crimes, those ranging from serious charges like armed robbery and aggravated assault to more minor crimes such as theft and drug possession. DNA-based exonerations for wrongful convictions tend to make news.
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