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Wrongly convicted
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In the States, you have to convince 12 people the accused committed the crime without any reasonable doubt. It's kind of easy to say the evidence might be overwhelming, but deceptive, but in a lot of cases, law enforcement (whether it's the cops, the technicians analyzing the evidence, or the D.A.) manipulates what a jury sees. Cops might plant evidence. Here in NC a few years ago, it came out the State Bureau of Investigations actively withheld evidence and conclusions that exonerated suspects. Or you find District Attorneys who file charges before they ever have the evidence...again in NC (before I moved down here) there was a high profile rape case involve the Duke University lacrosse team. The DA saw it as one of those cases that was going to propel his career, so he pushed for charges before he had the evidence. When it turned out the woman made the whole thing up, his career was ruined along with the lives of the men he prosecuted...In the category of things that will never happen, there needs to be vigorous prosecution and harsh sentences for anyone that "creates" one of these falsely accused cases. These people may be exonerated, but their lives are still ruined, and the people who ruined them are still free with no consequences for their actions.
I think part of the problem lies in "experts" giving highly technical evidence that nobody understands. There was a case here where it was claimed that DNA "proved" the accused was guilty. It was later found he could not have been, and in an unusual move, the image of the DNA evidence was published. A reasonable examination of it showed that it proved the opposite of what the "expert" claimed. There was another case where an FBI expert was brought in to give evidence, but a few months later the methodology was claimed to be unreliable in a scientific journal. In each case, the jury has to believe the expert because they have no means of evaluating the probability that he is right. There needs to be some sort of independent expert examination of such evidence.
No percentage of wrongful convictions is acceptable if you're a person in that group. That's self-evident. It's one of those things that is so wrong you don't want to think about it. DNA evidence isn't infallible. I recently read that DNA is transferred any time you come into physical contact with another person. There's a case where DNA transfer by paramedics caused an innocent man to be arrested. His alibi saved him, but the DNA tested positive, proving that DNA evidence isn't infallible. Here's the link: https://www.wired.com/story/dna-trans...
It seems there are no firm figures of the percent of wrongly convicted, but different studies claim they amount to btw 2 and 10%: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/o... (by John Grisham)
Basing on the above figures, is the miscarriage of justice tolerably low or, if say every 10th person is wrongly convicted, it requires a dramatic improvement? What do you think?