SJ Quinney College of Law, University of Utah Utah Law Digital Commons Utah Law Faculty Scholarship Utah Law Scholarship 10-2018 Overstating America's Wrongful Conviction Rate? Reassessing the Conventional Wisdom About the Prevalence of Wrongful Convictions Paul Cassell S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.law.utah.edu/scholarship Part of the Criminal Law Commons, and the Criminal Procedure Commons Recommended Citation Cassell, Paul G., 60 Ariz. L. Rev. 815 (2018) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Utah Law Scholarship at Utah Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Utah Law Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Utah Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. OVERSTATING AMERICA’S WRONGFUL CONVICTION RATE? REASSESSING THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM ABOUT THE PREVALENCE OF WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS Paul G. Cassell* A growing body of academic literature discusses the problem of wrongful convictions—i.e., convictions of factually innocent defendants for crimes they did not commit. But how often do such miscarriages of justice actually occur? Justice Scalia cited a figure of 0.027% as a possible error rate. But the conventional view in the literature is that, for violent crimes, the error rate is much higher—at least 1%, and perhaps as high as 4% or even more. This Article disputes that conventional wisdom. Based on a careful review of the available empirical literature, it is possible to assemble the component parts of a wrongful conviction rate calculation by looking at error rates at trial, the ratio of wrongful convictions obtained through trials versus plea bargains, and the percentage of cases resolved through pleas.