“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
I bring this up because the Circuit Attorney’s Office is claiming — now get this — their “overall conviction rate is 95%.”
A conviction is obtained when the state obtains a finding of guilty by a judge or jury, either after a guilty plea or a trial. The “conviction rate” is typically defined as “the number of convictions divided by the number of criminal cases brought.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate
Number of cases brought — in other words, the number of cases originally charged. This would include cases that where charges were brought and later dismissed. If a prosecutor brings charges in 100 cases and later dismisses 99 of them and has one case that ends in a plea of guilty, that prosecutor does not have a 100% conviction rate. She has a 1% conviction rate.
In 2019, at least a third of the cases assigned out to trial were dismissed by the CAO. That does not include the cases dismissed earlier, before they were assigned to a trial division — cases that were dismissed in associate circuit court for failure to prosecute (like the double murder case recently dismissed), dismissed by the state before trial for other reasons, etc. It would be interesting to know the CAO’s dismissal rate (number of cases eventually dismissed divided by the number of cases brought). I strongly doubt the CAO will release this information.
But no matter how you slice it, there is no possible way for the CAO to have a “95% conviction rate” like they claim as so many cases were being dismissed — unless they weren’t counting those dismissed cases in their statistics. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how they are determining their 95% number.
Besides conviction rate, there is also a trial conviction rate to show how well or poorly a prosecutor’s office is doing. Trial conviction rate is the number of cases where a guilty verdict is returned after trial divided by the number of cases that went to trial. In 2019 the CAO trial conviction rate was 54%. That means in 46% of the cases that went to trial — almost half — there was no finding of guilty or conviction: the defendant in those cases was fully acquitted.
So far this year (February, 2020), there has been, by my counting, 15 criminal jury trials (8 in January, 7 in February). The state had convictions — a finding of guilty on any charge — in 5 of those cases (4 not guilty in January, 6 not guilty in February). That’s a 33% jury trial conviction rate in 2020.
This dismal trial conviction rate only tells part of the story however. Even a finding of guilty is not necessarily a “win” for the state. For example, if someone charged with murder, armed criminal action, assorted felonies, and one misdemeanor went to jury trial and was found not guilty of all but the misdemeanor, this would count as a “win” or conviction in the state’s overall conviction rate.
The bottom line is that the CAO’s statistics are worse than damned lies.