why? Say someone is murdered, and it doesn't take much forensics to determine that they were attacked, restrained while alive, then shot in the back of the head execution style.

Or maybe it's even more blatent. police find a note from the day before that says "im going to kill you" then they end up dead.

Would you construe that the commission of those murders was premeditated? almost certainly yes, ergo whoever it gets pinned on, innocent or not will get premeditation applied, it doesn't take much extra here.

Evidence of pre-meditation !== evidence the suspect applied pre-meditation. You need to tie the premeditation to the suspect, I think. In your example, if you can't prove the suspect wrote the note, I don't think you can convict on first degree murder.

You don't need a jury. Almost every murder conviction in the USA is via a plea deal, and another percent are "bench trials" where you risk the judge's opinion instead of the jury.

The reason so many innocent people end up with life convictions is because so many face the death penalty and take a plea for life to avoid it, even knowing they are innocent.

Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong by Brandon Garrett (2011)

"In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA."

https://www.themarshallproject.org/books?share=book-10

Amazing book on how this happens.

[delayed]

Most people plead guilty to it.

Let's say the sentencing range after trial is 20 to 60 years (typical across the USA).

Let's also say you killed someone with a gun. That might add 25 years onto the base sentence (e.g. Illinois).

The prosecutor comes to you and says "If you go to trial you're facing 45 years minimum from the judge. Might be 50, 60, 70 years. Trial is a lot of work from my office, and a lot of money. We're going to have to bring in forensic experts and go through reams of police reports. I have a lot of other criminals that need my time, so I'll do you a favor. Plead out for 30 years today."

Also, murders can easily take five years to get through to disposition. Look at Cook County, you have Augustin Toscano who still hasn't got to trial after 15 years.

In that time you are sitting in a county jail. County jails generally have, by far, the worst conditions of any institution a prisoner can be held in. I deposed a warden once to ask him why. "Because these are short term facilities. The average stay is under 30 days. In fact, most people stay less than 48 hours." This is because they bond out, so the stats are skewed and don't provide for the edge cases.

Everybody in a county jail wants to get out of a county jail at almost any cost. I remember a case from a few years back when a homeless guy was snatched up coming out of a food bank with a bag of white powder. He was charged with possession of cocaine and he plead guilty and was sentenced to ten years. Just before shipping out to the big house the test results came back: it was powdered milk. The judge asked him why he plead guilty. "Because I couldn't stand another day in the county."

Fair enough, and fascinating. I guess I’m conflating first degree murder with “death penalty”. Please tell me nobody is pleading guilty and getting the death penalty.

It has happened: https://law.justia.com/cases/indiana/supreme-court/1997/77s0...

There are also many cases of people waving their right to appeal once sentenced, which can cause challenges for their counsel (from the link: "Should a death-row inmate who wishes to waive his appeals be viewed as a client making a legal decision to accept the justness of his punishment, or as a person seeking the aid of the state in committing suicide?"): https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

There are difficult issues everywhere you look with the death penalty. The one I can't understand how people get past is execution of the wrongfully convicted. Any justice system is flawed and makes mistakes - it's just too complicated to establish absolute truth when so many people with diverse motivations are involved in the process. We can save money by just putting them in prison until they die, giving us the option to partially undo the sentence in cases where innocence is later established.

Project Innocence helps exonerate innocent people. They claim that about 30% of their “clients” had admitted guilt. My understanding is that it’s mostly based on DNA evidence so not really a matter of opinion: https://innocenceproject.org/exonerations-data/

“Why” seems to be essentially coercion from the interviewers. People told that if they admit guilt then they’ll get a slap on the wrist and be let go, else go to costly trial etc.

Yeah, that's what they did with Kevin Fox who spent 9 months in the jail getting regular off-camera beatings from the guards, because he'd been charged with raping and killing his own daughter, before the prosecution admitted they'd been hiding exculpatory DNA evidence.

https://chicagojustice.org/inside-kevin-foxs-appellate-court...

After winning a $16m verdict against the corrupt cops and prosecutor he moved to Alabama where he was hit in a head-on collision by a car in the wrong lane and perished.

Sodium Thiopental could be used to weed out the criminals from innocent, but its use is often considered a violation of the 5th amendment. That's a key phrase equivalent for, "Oh! Oh!, they can prove my guilt with that, regardless of the amount of money and power I have." As such, both the criminals and the innocent will inevitably be sent down the river or the grave while ideologues continue to engage in political debates related to the drug's legality or usage in a criminal setting.

I would want a lot of peer reviewed research before I considered "truth serums" as providing anything actionable. The evidence would have to be absolutely overwhelming.

Read up on the Doolin case, which is mentioned in TFA. At best it's an incredibly shaky conviction based on a badly mishandled legal process, at worst it's an appalling miscarriage of justice.