Sixty-eight percent of capital convictions contain serious reversible flaws.

Evidence

Postconviction national legal reviews reveal an extremely high rate of serious flaws (68%) in capital convictions (Liebman, Fagan, & West, 2012). … These include highly incompetent defense lawyers as well as prosecutors who suppressed evidence favorable to defendants. Aggregation of evidence of prejudicial judgments and prosecutorial misconduct in individual cases reveals group socioeconomic and racial biases. Liebman and his collaborators (2000) describe the typical scenario in death sentences fraught with errors: The capital conviction or sentence will probably be overturned due to serious errors. It’ll take about nine years to find out, given how many other capital cases being reviewed for likely error are lined up ahead of this one. If the judgment is overturned, a lesser conviction or sentence will probably be imposed. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2085

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing claims about how institutions rationalize harmful policy — the 68% error rate is the concrete cost that moral disengagement lets citizens and officials tolerate. — connects to: Capital verdicts are often reversed due to inadequate counsel and condemned innocents — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2050
• SEED: Angle: the nine-year lag between likely-error convictions and reversal as a structural mechanism that quietly absorbs moral discomfort — errors get corrected so slowly society never confronts them as systemic.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2085