A study by an innocence commission set up by the state of Virginia estimates that up to 15% of rape convictions in that state may be of the wrong person. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports:
Data from Virginia’s post-conviction DNA project support the innocence of 33 persons convicted of sexual assaults from 1973 to 1987 concludes an Urban Institute study.
Findings released today indicate more people remain to be cleared by the Virginia project, a groundbreaking effort aimed at identifying persons wrongfully convicted in the 15 years before DNA testing was widely available.
The institute estimates a wrongful conviction rate in sexual assault cases of between 8 to 15 percent, comparable with the results in sample testing that exonerated two people and prompted then-Gov. Mark R. Warner to order the full Virginia project in 2005.
Jon Gould, director, of the Washington Institute for Public and International Affairs Research at American University, said “This is the most methodologically sound study that’s been done and the rate is much higher than has been shown in other studies.”
We should care about this for two reasons: First, because innocent people are in prison for crimes they didn’t commit; second, because the real rapists remain free to victimize others.
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Alverant
June 26, 2012 at 10:07 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Does it talk about where the mistake happened? Did the victim blame the wrong person (intentionally or unintentionally)? Did the police go with a lead and refuse to let go? Did the prosecution withold evidence?
michaeld
June 26, 2012 at 10:10 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Your title is also slightly misleading as it only applies from 1973 to 1987. This may not represent the false conviction rate of more recent years.
Ace of Sevens
June 26, 2012 at 10:14 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I would assume these were all cases where the perp was a stranger. I doubt many false accusations were the issue here. Nothing about the article indicated that any of the victims weren’t really raped. The most likely culprit is biased ID procedures like coached line-ups.
Dhorvath, OM
June 26, 2012 at 10:17 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It’s also misleading in that false is easily interpreted as no rape happened, not as a rape was committed by someone else by casual readers. I was certainly suprised to see the headline claim due to that mistake.
DaveL
June 26, 2012 at 10:19 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how DNA exoneration would be possible in such cases. It would seem to require that a woman have consensual sex with one man, submit to a rape examination, then accuse an entirely different man of rape. I have never personally heard of such a thing happening.
Tualha
June 26, 2012 at 10:29 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Third reason to care: the process that put those innocent people in prison should be reviewed to prevent such wrongful convictions from happening again.
pipenta
June 26, 2012 at 10:33 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
How do these stats compare to other types of violent crime?
It is interesting, because getting a guilty verdict and a conviction for rape is much less likely than for other violent crimes. Unless the stats have changed a lot since the late seventies when I was a rape crisis advocate. Back then, based on FBI* statistics, rape was pretty much the best violent crime you could do, if you wanted to get away with it. Sadly, I suspect things haven’t changed much at all.
* A very conservative organization by anyone’s measure.
Crip Dyke, MQ, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden
June 26, 2012 at 10:35 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I know where you’re at, Dhorvath, but the convictions were false – the complaints weren’t necessarily false.
But, yes, the study specifically looked at pre-DNA testing cases and used DNA testing as the arbiter of guilt or innocence. Thus, if we have a much more reliable tool now, we should be able to do much, much better. The results of this study give me horrible pause, but they don’t say as much about jury trials as one would think. For one, many of those convicted were convicted on a guilty plea. The plea-bargaining system is out of control, but we don’t know how many on this list plead guilty vs. how many were convicted at trial. Also, we don’t know the % wrongfully convicted in cross-racial rape cases – while folk are pretty terrible at IDing folk of color in lineups, etc.
from the article:
The study tells us far too many people are going to jail than should (we already knew that far too many rapists stay out of jail when they shouldn’t). But it doesn’t tell us what about the system needs to change.
I wish it was as simple as doing DNA testing. That helps in many cases, but in some cases it doesn’t because shame causes a victim to shower/brush teeth/etc before deciding to report. In other cases it doesn’t help because some criminals are aware that what they are doing is rape; they do it with premeditation; and their planning involves planning to reduce DNA transfer. Finally there are cases where sex is uncontested but the nature and existence of consent is.
So which kinds of cases are these, and what do we need to do differently to nab the right people and protect the innocent folk?
It is the difficulty in answering this last question that gives me more pause even than the raw percentage of wrongful convictions. Each person represents a living tragedy, which is bad enough. But each also foreshadows a hundred or more future tragedies if we don’t learn how to prevent the same mistakes from happening again.
So this study isn’t as important to me (I’ve been aware of the problem of false convictions for some time). While some consider it vital to quantify the problem, I’ve been convinced for a while that the problem is already bad enough to take seriously if we have even one person wrongly convicted. I’m waiting for the research that tells us exactly how good faith enforcement efforts go wrong. Is it just the same factors as other crimes (poor eyewitness ID procedures and the problems of eyewitness ID -especially across racial boundaries- generally? poor investigative procedures? insufficient funding for appropriate lab tests? insufficient funding of the public defender’s office? what?) or are there factors unique to rape/sexual assault cases that lead to false convictions that would not otherwise occur?
I’ll be all over such a study.
slc1
June 26, 2012 at 10:37 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
As the late an unlamented Dominick Dunne would say, maybe those fellows weren’t guilty of the rapes they were convicted of but they were probably guilty of other rapes that they were not persons of interest. End snark.
Dhorvath, OM
June 26, 2012 at 10:45 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Crip Dyke,
Thanks, I did figure out the difference, but it’s because I read on and found the distinction plain once I did so. My embarrassment aside, it’s less a problem with distilling an article to a short blurb than it is with lazily assuming the blurb is the article.
I too would find the follow up studies on why these convictions don’t hold up quite interesting, although I suspect I would get less out of them. Thanks for your clarifying comments.
Ace of Sevens
June 26, 2012 at 11:15 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I would assume it’s worse for other crimes since those are almost always committed by strangers and rape frequently isn’t. This is only an issue when a stranger is the perp.
skeptifem
June 26, 2012 at 11:25 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I don’t understand how they estimated this, much less claimed accuracy.
As other people have pointed out these seem to have been stranger rapes, a minority of rapes, and I would bet there is a racial component to many of them.
I am sure the MRAs will swarm all over this to mean that 15% of rapes are *made up*. I want to know if anyone is helping victims who thought they got closure only to find out that the rapist is still out there. It must be hell to go through the rape, the reporting, the trial, etc and then find that out.
Ace of Sevens
June 26, 2012 at 11:57 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@skeptifem, while stranger-rapes are a minority of rapes in general, I understand they make up a much larger portion of rape convictions, which is what this study was looking at. (Thanks to the difficulty of prosecuting acquaintance-rape due to practical and social factors.)
d cwilson
June 26, 2012 at 12:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m becoming concerned with the effect shows like CSI is having on our perceptions of the criminal system. The fact is, in most violent crimes, DNA is not recovered, so it can’t be used to establish guilt or innocence. If eye witness identification is this bad (and it is), imagine how many innocent people are behind bars who can’t even get a DNA test to exonerate them.
piffleprattle
June 26, 2012 at 12:54 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The elephant in the room of course is how many people, especially those blessed with a high melanin content, are now pushing up the daises courtesy of the legalised murder that is so popular in many parts.
Illuminata, Genie in the Beer Bottle
June 26, 2012 at 12:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
d cwilson – i was recently called for jury duty where this was specifcally and repeatedly stressed. The real world isn’t CSI. most municipalities don’t have such resources. etc etc.
And, jumping off of piffleprattle’s starting point – I’m not sure it made any difference to the case. It was a young black kid who shot someone. he was guilty before that gun was fired (by whomever).
I have a law background though, so I never get picked for juries.
Ed Brayton
June 26, 2012 at 2:21 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
If MRAs claim this means that 15% of all rape claims are false, they’re idiots (but I repeat myself). False convictions does not mean false claims of being raped. False convictions means they convicted the wrong person, not that the victim was not raped. Indeed, as someone notes above, the fact that there was DNA to test strongly suggests otherwise.
The importance of this finding is that those who were wrongly convicted were wrongly convicted on the basis of the same kind of evidence that convicts other people every day, much of which is faulty if not handled correctly (like many forms of forensic analysis and eyewitness testimony and identifications). DNA evidence only exists in a very small number of cases (though it’s more likely to exist in a rape case than in any other kind of case, for obvious reasons), so it’s reasonable to assume that in those cases that lack DNA evidence, there are probably many more cases of wrongful conviction. I do agree with the commenter above, however, who says that the existence of DNA testing today makes it much less likely that there will be false convictions, especially in a rape case (assuming the prosecutors allow it to be tested).
But no, this certainly has nothing to do with false rape claims, it has only to do with convicting the wrong person. And it is tragic on both counts that so many innocent men had their lives ruined while so many real rapists were allowed to victimize more women.
Ed Brayton
June 26, 2012 at 2:25 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
skeptifem wrote:
That’s a really good question. I certainly hope so. You’re absolutely right, it would be horrible for any of the victims to know that. I was going to say that it would be like being victimized a second time, but it’s really more like a third time — the first time being the rape itself, the second time being the inevitable assault on their character during the trial as the defense tries to prove that she was to blame for it, and now this. Unfortunately, I highly doubt there’s anything being done to contact them or help them with this new information. The DOJ recently found hundreds of cases where the person might be innocent due to faulty evidence from an FBI lab, but they didn’t even bother to contact the attorneys for those who might be innocent, much less the victims. The only ones they informed were the prosecutors, who have no incentive to do anything to fix the problem.
Dr X
June 27, 2012 at 12:02 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@5 DaveL:
This was our Illinois introduction to clearing the wrongly convicted with DNA evidence. It was big news at the time (1985) and both the accuser and the accused became household names here for quite some time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Dotson
leni
June 27, 2012 at 11:03 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Tangentially related, but Frontline had a disturbing episode about the problems endemic in forensics labs and coroners’ office across the country.
Such as an elected coronor who was an ObGyn with no forensic pathology training. Or the case of a murder victim whose body was cremated because the lab had no freezer storage and couldn’t afford a burial. It goes on and on.
The episode was called “Post Mortem” and is on Netflix if you’re interested. I highly recommend it.
left0ver1under
June 27, 2012 at 5:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Two thoughts on this:
(1) I would bet a fair number of those false convictions involve lazy police. The didn’t look for the guilty party, they looked for someone who was easy to convict. The cops both railroaded both the accused into a false confession and the victim into giving a false identification.
(2) False rape convictions make it easier for actual rapists to claim and feign innocence. Dominique Strauss-Kahn is depending on that, and is no doubt invoking the Bill Donahue accusation of “gold digger”.