> In the UK it's pretty rare to prosecute the innocent.

Really?

When i did jury duty, probably about a third of the charges i heard were pretty obviously groundless.

As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "Better a hundred guilty men go free, than one innocent man is prosecuted without due process of law." Oh, wait....

I don't think human nature changes drastically between politically defined boundaries. Besides, a simple google search shows roughly the same proportion of innocents convicted per trial.

Bear in mind that those statistics are enormously skewed by plea bargaining, for both good and bad reasons. Good plea bargaining is where the evidence is extremely strong and the defendant has little criminal history, so admitting guilt and serving a minimal sentence is in everyone's interest. The bad kind is where prosecutors have a weak case but bring so many charges that defendant is facing a horrendously long time in prison, and pleads guilty to a crime that wasn't committed rather than take the risk of extended incarceration.

Human nature's probably much the same but the systems and their incentives seem pretty different.