karl1800 --
Thanks for your clarification, and I believe that I can now give you
the "x"s you are seeking. In order to streamline the answer, I am
going to give you your filled-in sentences at the outset, and then
spend some time explaining where the numbers come from, what they mean
and how I found them.
Here are my suggestions for filling in your blanks:
1. "More than one-third of all murders in the U.S. go unsolved."
2. "Many scholars who have studied the subject of wrongful convictions
conservatively estimate that between one-half and one percent of
criminal convictions fall into that category. Some estimates,
however, run as high as ten percent."
3. "According to a comprehensive Department of Justice study about
lifetime risks of being a crime victim, a person has a 5 in 6 chance
of being a victim of a completed or attempted violent crime during his
or her lifetime."
The following discussion takes each statement in turn and provides
more information and explanation:
1. Unsolved murders:
Statement:
"More than one-third of all murders in the U.S. go unsolved."
Support for the statement:
According to the most recent published information from the Justice
Department, 62.4% of murders reported in 2001 were solved. Here is
the critical paragraph from "Crime in the United States: 2001:
"For [Uniform Crime Reporting] purposes, a clearance is counted
when a crime is solved either by arrest or by exceptional means, i.e.,
when some reason outside the control of law enforcement precludes
making an arrest. In the United States in 2001, 46.2 percent of all
violent crimes were cleared. Within this category, 62.4 percent of
murders were cleared, 56.1 percent of aggravated assaults, 44.3
percent of forcible rapes,and 24.9 percent of robberies were cleared."
FBI: DOJ: Crime in the United States:2001
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_01/01crime.pdf
(The above link is a PDF document, which requires Adobe Reader to
access. In the unlikely event that it is not installed on your
computer, use this link for a free and convenient download):
Adobe Reader Download
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
While this authoritative and recent citation should be sufficient for
your purposes, it is useful to know that this rate of murder-solving
has been consistent in recent years. This fact supports the notion
that a similar percentage of old murders are never solved. Here is
what a recent article from a periodical of the National Association of
Criminal Defense Lawyers has to say:
"The statistics: for murder, which has the highest clearance rate, for
2001, the most recent year for which full statistics are available, is
62.4 percent. The overall rate for violent crimes (murder, forcible
rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) is 46.2 percent. The clearance
rate for property crimes is 16.2 percent, and the overall clearance
rate for all crimes is 19.6 percent. These figures have remained
relatively steady for years; in fact, in an era where law enforcement
resources have dramatically increased, the clearance rates have
decreased slightly.
"In other words, more than a third of murders and well more than half
of other violent crimes go unsolved, through no fault of ?loopholes,?
general fairness considerations, or other bogeymen. Despite what
authorities would have the public believe, the number of perpetrators
roaming the streets is predominately due to the fact that they are not
arrested, due to lack of leads, failure to follow leads, or whatever
other factor."
Champion Magazine: Witness For The Defense, by Daniel Dotson (July 2003)
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:A-oKmfNfK8MJ:www.nacdl.org/public.nsf/0/719b8e42f78ad17a85256d5f00503a5d%3FOpenDocument+murder+62.4+%22clearance+rate%22&hl=en
2. Wrongful Convictions:
Statement:
"Many scholars who have studied the subject of wrongful convictions
conservatively estimate that between one-half and one percent of
criminal convictions fall into that category. Some estimates run as
high as ten percent."
Support for the statement:
There are many assertions on this subject, but little hard evidence,
for the reason I pointed out in my clarification request. Here are
some of the better available sources for you.
The first three sources are scholars or journalists who conservatively
estimate the rate of wrongful conviction at .5%, based on on total
annual convictions of between 1 and 2 million:
"In their 1995 book, "Mistaken Identification", professors Brian
Cutler and Steven Penrod estimated that out of every 1-million
convictions nationally, 5,000 involve innocent people.
Iowa State U.: St. Petersburg Times: 4/6/03
http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/gwells/StPetersburgTImes.pdf
"About 10,000 people in the United States may be wrongfully convicted
of serious crimes each year, a new study suggests. The results are
based on a survey of 188 judges, prosecuting attorneys, public
defenders, sheriffs and police chiefs in Ohio and 41 state attorneys
general. The study also found that the most important factor leading
to wrongful conviction is eyewitness
misidentification. These findings are included in the new book
Convicted But Innocent: Wrongful Conviction and Public Policy (Sage
Publications, 1996). The book was written by C. Ronald Huff, director
of the Criminal Justice Research Center and the School of Public
Policy and Management at Ohio State University; Arye Rattner,
professor of sociology at the University of Haifa, Israel; and the
late Edward Sagarin, who was a professor of sociology at City College
and CityUniversity of New York.
"The survey asked respondents to estimate the prevalence of wrongful
conviction in the United States. About 72 percent estimated that less
than 1 percent -- but more than zero -- of convictions were of
innocent people.
Based on these results, Huff estimated conservatively that 0.5 percent
of the 1,993,880 convictions for index crimes in 1990 were of innocent
people. (Index crimes, which are reported by the FBI, are murder and
non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault,
robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft and arson.) That
would result in an estimated 9,969 wrongful convictions."
Research News: Ohio State University
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/ronhuff.htm
"In his book Presumed Guilty: When Innocent People Are Wrongly
Convicted, journalist and private investigator Martin Yant cites
experts who estimate the rate of wrongful convictions at between
one-half percent to 10% of persons convicted of serious crimes. With
an annual conviction rate of approximately 1.5 million, the
conservative estimate of one-half percent means over 7500 innocent
people convicted each year in place of the guilty."
Humanism by Joe: Leave Consenting Adults Alone
http://www.humanismbyjoe.com/Leave_Consenting_Adults_Alone.htm
Not surprisingly, critics of the criminal justice system have higher estimates:
"According to nationally recognized defense attorney Terry Gilbert,
the best estimates we have of the number of wrongful convictions is
around five percent of the total. 'To some people five percent may not
seem like a lot,' he says, 'but when you consider how many thousands
of people are convicted of crimes each year, you begin to get a sense
of the size of the problem.'"
AlterNet: Innocence Lost: DNA Tests Expose Justice System's Flaws (11/6/01)
http://www.alternet.org/story/11866/
"The Frequency of Wrongful Conviction. Estimates from academicians,
prosecutors, judges, sheriffs, police chiefs, public defenders, those
within the innocence movement and others range from one-half of one
percent (1 in 200) to ten percent or higher."
Innocence Project: New Orleans
http://www.ip-no.org/resources.html
3. Chance of being a violent crime victim.
Statement:
"According to a comprehensive Department of Justice study about
lifetime risks of being a crime victim, a person has a 5 in 6 chance
of being a victim of a completed or attempted violent crime during his
or her lifetime."
Support for the statement:
There is much information online that is related to your question, but
almost all of it is ambiguous, unsourced, based on a risk in a given
year (as opposed to a lifetime risk) or applies only to a specific
community. I suggest that you go with an authoritative, but somewhat
older (1987) Justice Department that estimated a lifetime risk for
consummated and attempted violent crimes. It seems to me that this
statistic is more useful for your purpose than one that is limited to
completed crimes, as well as being the most authoritative information
available. Here is the complete reference to that statistic in a 1997
DOJ staff report:
"5 out of 6 persons are expected to
be a victim of an attempted or completed
violent crime (rape, robbery,
and assault, excluding murder) at
least once during life, based on
1975-84 annual victimization rates.
(See Lifetime Likelihood of Victimization,
BJS, NCJ-10427, March 1987.)"
DOJ: Bureau of Justice Statistics: Special Report: March 1997
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/llgsfp.pdf
Search Strategy:
The difficult part of this research was not finding information
relevant to your question -- there is lots of it -- but sifting
through it find the most authoritative and useful data for your
purposes. Using the "unsolved murders" as an example, I first used a
series of Google searches like this one to get a range of relevant
information:
"percent of homicides OR murders" unsolved OR "never solved"
://www.google.com/search?num=30&hl=en&lr=&q=%22percent+of+homicides+OR+murders%22+unsolved+OR+%22never+solved%22
Once I found the DOJ report that reported the clearance rate for
murders in 2001, I used details from the report's language to find
related information from other sources. Here's just one of many
searches I performed using that tactic:
murder 62.4 "clearance rate"
://www.google.com/search?num=30&hl=en&lr=&q=murder+62.4+%22clearance+rate%22
I followed the same strategy with the other two issues.
As noted above, I have purposely tried to make this answer most useful
and convenient for you by including only the most relevant and
documented information that I came across.
I am reasonably confident that I given you what you want and need, but
if anything is unclear, please ask for clarification before rating the
answer.
markj-ga |
