I stand corrected, Counselor; thank you.
It's easy to get information that's technically correct and completely misleading; the system is complex enough that it can be hard to get to the big picture. In fact, it's entirely possible that the 9th is the most reversed in raw numbers, but raw numbers can be misleading. Taken to an extreme example, consider a Court A that has had 5 cases reversed out of a million heard, and a Court B that has 3 cases reversed out of 4 heard. Which is doing the worse job?I stand corrected, Counselor; thank you.
It's easy to get information that's technically correct and completely misleading; the system is complex enough that it can be hard to get to the big picture. In fact, it's entirely possible that the 9th is the most reversed in raw numbers, but raw numbers can be misleading. Taken to an extreme example, consider a Court A that has had 5 cases reversed out of a million heard, and a Court B that has 3 cases reversed out of 4 heard. Which is doing the worse job?
It's not just bias on the part of the courts; it's also the way prosecutors engage in charge-stacking, scare the daylights out of defendants with potential maximum sentences (that are almost never meted out; read the article, it's excellent, and written by a former Assistant US Attorney), then talk them into plea bargains.The numbers aren't reliable in any case (for or against the 9th) because the only court that can overturn them is SCOTUS. SCOTUS declines far more cases than they review. In the last year alone, 6,303 cases were filed and only 71 were actually argued. So it's hard to say how many would've been overturned had they been accepted. Sure, some of them didn't warrant a review, but SCOTUS and other courts have to do triage. They could never hear all the legitimate cases that are filed.
That's one reason the DoJ has such an abnormally high conviction rate. It would be difficult to argue against bias in the federal court system in favor of the federal government, when both statistics, and anecdotal cases of prosecutorial overreach are considered.
It's not just bias on the part of the courts; it's also the way prosecutors engage in charge-stacking, scare the daylights out of defendants with potential maximum sentences (that are almost never meted out; read the article, it's excellent, and written by a former Assistant US Attorney), then talk them into plea bargains.
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