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Notes -
There are 1-2 exonerations each year where DNA evidence that was not presented at trial unambiguously exonerates the defendant. The US takes so long to litigate death penalty cases that this number should drop slightly further as we start executing the people whose first trials happened after DNA evidence became ubiquitous.
So the rate of actual innocence among people convicted at the first capital trial is closer to 1 in 20, unfortunately.
Why does this happen? Some of it is actual dishonest and corrupt prosecutors. A lot of it is that the typical tough-on-crime conservative voter (thanks for being the existence proof, @Hoffmeister25) and the politicians they elect doesn't care if a career violent criminal like Marcellus Williams is actually guilty of the specific crime they are condemned for - he was already in jail for a crime he was uncontroversially guilty of that would be capital in a "tough" system at the time.
The more interesting reason is that public prosecutors don't have clients. For every other lawyer with a duty of zealous advocacy, there is a client who has the ability to call the lawyer off, and is morally (and occasionally legally) responsible for not sending their lawyer out to zealously advocate for an injustice. (In the UK the split legal profession creates an element of this, with a Crown Prosecution Service solicitor making the decision to prosecute and preparing the case, but a hired barrister handling the courtroom advocacy). It is hard to switch between the mindsets of "My job in Court is to make the best possible case regardless of what actually happened - in this courtroom it is the defence attorney's job to get innocent defendants acquitted and mine to get guilty defendants convicted." to the mindset of "Am I actually advancing the interests of the People by continuing to prosecute this innocent defendant?"
since we supposedly wish to let ten guilty men go free rather than let one innocent man go to the gallows, 1 in 20 is pretty good! is my math wrong?
as stated here https://www.themotte.org/post/1181/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/253893?context=8#context by https://www.themotte.org/@hydroacetylene
Indeed, "1 in 20 people on death row are innocent of the capital crime" is mildly unsettling.
"1 in 20 scumbags who end up on death row are innocent of the capital crime" is significantly less unsettling and feels like an acceptable error rate.
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