> Japan has a conviction rate that exceeds 99% (Note that it includes guilty plea cases.[1]), which has been attributed to low prosecutorial budgets impelling understaffed prosecutors to present judges with only the most obviously guilty defendants.[2]
I don't know if that's bad. Another way to look at the numbers: in Florida, with a 59% conviction rate, almost half the cases brought by prosecutors are a waste of everyone's time.
One is they get people to confess --the police can detain people and hold them for up to 23 days without charge [1]. Sometimes they make it difficult to meet with an attorney --attorneys are not allowed to be present during questioning.
Two, they tend to prosecute only the cases with "solid" evidence.
This can result in lots of "he died falling down the stairs" because investigators are unwilling to do the hard work finding the murderer(s) who beat someone with a bat, for example.
It's a mixed bag of good and bad. It's good because as you mentioned - wastes less money. It's bad because anyone brought forward is expected to be guilty (even if innocent) because otherwise they would not have been prosecuted to begin with, right?
If you're being prosecuted you're essentially assumed guilty in all but the most rare cases.
With a 59% conviction rate - it means more people are being assumed innocent until proven guilty, or that the evidence is too weak to prosecute on. If that means innocent people don't get unfairly imprisoned - that's a good thing.
I'd rather see 10 guilty people walk free than one innocent unfairly imprisoned.
With a 59% conviction rate - it means more people are being assumed innocent until proven guilty, or that the evidence is too weak to prosecute on. If that means innocent people don't get unfairly imprisoned - that's a good thing.
If you can afford bail, a 59% conviction rate means that you're less likely to be wrongfully imprisoned. But there are a lot of people who can't post bail and end up spending months or years behind bars only to be found not guilty -- or even to have all the charges against them dropped.
Even when 9/10 of the innocent people arrested and unfairly imprisoned are poor black kids, but 9/10 of the guilty people who walk free are rich white men?
