US juries get verdict wrong in one of six cases
‘So much for US justice: juries get the verdict wrong in one out of six criminal cases and judges don’t do much better, a new study has found.
And when they make those mistakes, both judges and juries are far more likely to send an innocent person to jail than to let a guilty person go free, according to an upcoming study out of Northwestern University.
“Those are really shocking numbers,” said Jack Heinz, a law professor at Northwestern who reviewed the research of his colleague Bruce Spencer, a professor in the statistics department.
Recent high-profile exonerations of scores of death row inmates have undermined faith in the infallibility of the justice system, Heinz said.’
