Presumably, almost everyone exonorated by DNA tests has the charges against them dropped. Presumably, almost everyone implicated by DNA tests is convicted.

Presumably some case are brought in which DNA evidence is never submitted because, e.g., the police report is made too far after the fact or proper collection procedures weren’t followed.

Generally speaking, around 95% of cases where someone is charged with a crime result in a plea bargain or convciction at trial.

I will make a reasonable estimate of the percentage with no DNA evidence as 1/6th of cases (this is partially to make the math easy, but not grossly off).

So, of the 100 people charged with rape and not exonorated prior to trial by DNA evidence, there are going to be 60 people convicted on the basis of DNA evidence, and 35 people convicted on the basis of non-DNA evidence, and 5 people who get off. We also know that almost all of the 60 with DNA evidence implicating them will plea bargain, that about 30 more people convicted will plea bargain and that about 10 more people will go to trial. People who are factually innocent overwhelmingly go to trial even if it isn’t in their interest to do so because the situation looks bad.

We know that if DNA testing were better at least 15 of the 40 people charged in cases with no DNA evidence were guilty. We know that if DNA testing were beter that 5 of the 40 people charged with no DNA evidence are innocent, and it is safe to guess that 4 or 5 of them go to trial.

I suspect that of the 20 people for whom there is no DNA evidence even submitted, not merely an inconclusive test result, that the guilty rate is probably higher than for the cases where there is DNA evidence. This is because prosecutors want stronger evidence if they can’t rely on a DNA test and don’t even have a good sample that could have been submitted. Suppose that 2 of the 20 in that group are actually innocent and that both go to trial.

We have probably 7 innocent people going to trial, and probably 3 guilty people going to trial. Five people get convicted. Clearly at least 2 of those convicted of rape are really innocent. And, trials without DNA evidence aren’t perfectly accurate. There is a good chance that at least 1 of the 3 guilty people will go free, and so at least one more innocent person was probably convicted.

If this is right, something on the order of 3/95 people convicted of rape are innocent. This is still closer to 3% than 4%.

So, this data suggests that on the order of 3% of those convicted of rape are really innocent, and that half or more of those convicted at trial of rape are really innocent.

It also suggests that of 120 people accused of rape, that perhaps 28 are really innocent. Thus, more than 22-23% of accusations of rape are probably inaccurate. While this is less than a third, it is a large number. Many false accusations are probably in good faith, but that does no good to the guy facing rape charges with no DNA evidence to bail him out — for innocent peole accused of rape in that situation it looks bad.

My guess is that 8 out of 40, which is about 20% of people accused of rape in cases with no DNA evidence are innocent.

The conviction rate for guilty rapists is probably close to 91/92 which is 98-99%. The conviction rate for innocent people accuse of rape is probably close to 3/28 which is about 10-11%. Convictions of the innocent probably outnumber acquittals of the guilty by 3-1.

A third is probably a conservative number for the percentage of people convicted AT TRIAL of rape.

See the parallel article here for details debunking Daran and sourcing the original comment, inlcuding a link to the original article on the USA Today website.

All links gratefully received. See also my Rebuttal.

it’s 06.06.06.06.06.06

I have approved all your posts so far.

I’ve tried to post, but nothing shows up. I thought this was unmoderated.

This is a bizarre piece of reasoning. Whether the false conviction rate is 33%, 25% or 3% doesn’t say anything about the false claim rate. A rape victim may misidentify his or her attacker or may not be able to identify his or her attacker, etc. That does not mean that the rape claim was false, only that the accusation against that particular person was false. IIRC, something like one in 7 people on death row have been exonerated by DNA evidence. That doesn’t mean that the people they were accused of murdering aren’t dead, only that the people convicted of those crimes weren’t the guilty ones.

Whatever the prevalence of false convictions, it is not obvious that this problem is peculiarly associated with the crime of rape.

For what it’s worth, of the 180 people exonerated by The Innocence Project, I think roughly 100 had been convicted of sexual assault (among other crimes).