Talk:Conviction rate

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Reference 4 inappropriate

Reference 4 is completely inappropriate, as it does NOT present conviction rates at all.

And which reference 4 would that be? Reference numbers change with every reference added. So referring to references by their numbers here is pretty pointless. By going pack to when the above comment was made, what was probably being referred to was the reference to: DOJ Staff (2012). "United States Attorneys' Annual Statistical Report for Fiscal Year 2012" (PDF). United States Department of Justice. Retrieved 28 October 2014.. This is dated now and deriving a conviction rate from it seems to be obscure process, though page numbers and quotes would help, so we can pinpoint the information. However, I see an update is needed, too. But rather than just make an obscure comment on the talk page there are inline clean-up tags that can be used by editors to identify faulty citations directly, with pinpoint precision. Be bold and use them. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 08:35, 7 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Canada

Woah! You can't just strike out the previous sourced statistic of 97 % conviction rate and change it with some podcast, were some lawyer says it is 67, can you? Maybe at least leave both sources for observation? 185.65.134.169 (talk) 10:21, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes I can. The podcast includes explanations from an expert on exactly what the other source got wrong. Do you think a source gets less reliable just because it's not written word on a page? Amaurea (talk) 04:53, 23 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

An "expert" on a BBC podcast, that will be available on a BBC website only for a year is not a statistic source. Something like "law.ca" or "official-statistics.ca" would have been a proper source, otherwise you just swapped one dubious source with another one. I'd rather cross out the whole section of Canada from the page if there is no official statistics available, rather than write an "expert" opinion. 213.30.233.195 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 15:57, 29 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Radio from a reputable source counts as WP:PUBLISHED. The previous source is also acceptable (and made the same point about one in three cases being withdrawn), and this Wikipedia article wasn't even being inaccurate! It was being badly written. The previous version said that "In Canada, the national conviction rate is about 97%. This does not include cases in which the charges are dropped, which comprise about one-third of criminal cases.", giving a dramatic opening statistic as a complete sentence and then explaining that the number in the previous sentence should then be reduced by around one third (which matches the 62% now given). --Lord Belbury (talk) 20:28, 4 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Japan/US

I don't know if the reference "https://thediplomat.com/2020/03/carlos-ghosn-and-japans-99-conviction-rate/ should be allowed because it doesn't appear correct. The article talks about how most Japanese cases don't bring an indictment and how the US uses plea bargains in kind of the same way(although prosecutors in the US also don't take cases to trial and those cases don't count towards conviction rates either)

"Japan’s often-cited conviction rate of over 99 percent is a percentage of all prosecuted cases, not just contested cases. It is eye-catching, but misleading, since it counts as convictions those cases in which defendants pleaded guilty. If the U.S. conviction rate were calculated in a similar manner it would also exceed 99 percent since so few cases are contested at trial (in FY 2018 only 320 of the total number of 79,704 federal defendants were acquitted at trial)."

But in the US plea bargins are still counted towards conviction rates https://www.britannica.com/topic/plea-bargaining/Benefits-of-plea-bargaining it's even talked about on the plea bargain wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargain

He also doesn't give any clue how he got to the 99% the US, other than federal numbers which aren't the same as overall numbers would be at so I thought I should bring it up here. It reads off like someone had an opinion they put in.

I also don't get the point of the sentence in US part "That said, the ostensible "conviction rate" may not be accurate because the charges are dropped." Because if the person isn't being charged with a crime any longer, and there isn't a result to the trial or a plea bargin then yeah it doesn't count. It just feels like a snide remark with the quotes instead of just giving facts.

Weaponizedwombat (talk) 08:41, 23 September 2021 (UTC)Weaponizedwombat[reply]

The Phrase "If measured in the same way, the United States' federal conviction rate would be 99.8%."should be deleted.

I added the word "federal" there because it was missing.

At the beginning, we talk about the general conviction rate in Japan. This figure is strikingly high.

So the author is trying to explain this high number. That's important for context, I agree.

But the 99.8% figure comes from the United States Federal Court. We compare the federal conviction rate to the overall conviction rate. Why?

Just because it looks better.

The 99.8% figure is derived from guilty pleas and trials in the United States federal courts. This does not include dismissed cases to make the conviction rate look higher.

But even then, the U.S. federal conviction rate is simply wrong. It would only be 99.63% = (90% + (2% * 83%)) / (92%)

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-federal-criminal-defendants-go-to-trial-and-most-who-do-are-found-guilty/

The source cited for the 99.8 cannot explain where it got its number.

If one wanted to state facts, one would have to say that the Japanese conviction rate seems high, but if one takes into account that the bar for indictment is higher than in other countries, part of this rate is explained. Even taking into account the low indictment rate, the conviction rate of japan is still disproportionately high.

All in all, this sentence is just an opinion and not a fact.

It tries to paint a better picture, and that should not be on Wikipedia. 178.192.103.73 (talk) 15:18, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

References

Reference 20 (BJS Staff. "FAQ Detail: What is the probability of conviction for felony defendants?". Bureau of Justice Statistics. Retrieved 21 January 2020.) is broken. It links to a Bureau of Justice Statistics page that contains no relevant information. I also can't find it by searching the title of the FAQ question, nor can I find it by looking through the general FAQ section. Maybe it moved or there's an archive of it somewhere?

--Kelvinnkat (talk) 21:06, 26 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]