Issue is that we don't have these numbers. People are consistently proven to have been innocent after serving decades in prison for crimes they did not commit but were convicted of. In addition, as only 2 states in the US allowed for a majority conviction, the data set would necessarily be small. Compounding that is that we essentially have no real way to determine who was guilty but found innocent as once you are found innocent that's generally the end of the road. The primary concern in this situation should be increasing the difficulty of convicting an innocent person. The guilty going free should be a secondary matter.

So while I understand your point, as you stated, we have no other information and as such the numbers we would need to validate it simply don't and won't exist.

> In addition, as only 2 states in the US allowed for a majority conviction, the data set would necessarily be small

Small data set does not necessarily entail it's not statistically significant.

> So while I understand your point, as you stated, we have no other information and as such the numbers we would need to validate it simply don't and won't exist.

"Won't exist" is a pretty strong claim. I posited but one example where the original claim was false, but I can probably come up with dozens of other scenarios where simple majority or unanimity are clearly inferior as the only two options.

>> we don't have these numbers

>> consistently proven

Your argument does not jive.

It's certainly possible to know something happens without having exact numbers e.g. we know people consistently die from COVID but we won't have a truly solid number for the death rate until COVID dies down and we do antibody testing. And that's now! Think of how uncertain we were about the death rate 2 months ago yet we were still certain people were dying from it.

We don't have the numbers showing the number of guilty people found innocent. We also don't have an accurate count of the number of innocent people found guilty, only that it has happened consistently. I explain this in the rest of the post.

My argument does not jive only if you are looking for flaw and determined to find it even if it is only semantics.

Best of luck to you in these trying times.

I think this is one of those situations where statistics can't be applied because if you can't guarantee a 0% false positive rate, even one person being convicted wrongly can't be tolerated. It's not a question of which statistical measurement is better but which approach society is willig to accept.

> I think this is one of those situations where statistics can't be applied because if you can't guarantee a 0% false positive rate, even one person being convicted wrongly can't be tolerated.

You can't guarantee a 0% false conviction rate even when requiring unanimity. That's why I said if the false conviction rate was the same, but the true conviction rate was better, clearly that's a better scenario.

You can't and you won't try to. You leave it to the quality of jurors in the locality,allow maximim number of jurors(practically limited) and unanimity. False conviction rate at 11/12 guilty verdict can be 90% in NYC and 40% in rural alabama for example and it can change ovet time based on population change. Someone needs to keep track of the stats, their methods will need oversight and what happens when bad politicians want high conviction rates, influence the stats measurement? Will be gerrymandering all over again.

Maybe, assuming that the better true conviction rate is a more just outcome. The goal here is justice. There are crimes where a conviction could be worse than the crime. I.e. abused child accused of murdering abuser. Giving any single juror essentially the power to veto a conviction is a very good thing for justice and sets a very high standard for police & prosecution.

There's no way to know what the false conviction rate is. We can only know what the proven false conviction rate is. There's presumably always some percentage of innocent people who can't find an alibi or other evidence to clear themselves of a crime they did not commit.