Bridget McCormack

But I do think the fact that, you know, we have a legal system run by humans and humans are imperfect and busy.

I want to be very careful, very clear that there's a big difference between state and federal court, right?

95%, 96% of cases are heard in state courts, not federal courts.

I mean, the federal courts do a very, very small, a much smaller number of cases and generally have larger staff to help them.

State courts are managing most disputes with fewer resources and doing the best they can.

But if you look at the rate of reversals by appellate courts, by intermediate appellate courts and state Supreme Courts, they're getting a lot wrong, right?

So, you know, humans get things wrong for lots of reasons.

Yeah.

I don't know if it's going up.

I could probably figure that out, but I don't know that off the top of my head.

It is the fact that it's quite high.

The number of cases where an appellate court reverses the work of a lower court is not a low number.

It's going to be different from state to state and different in the federal appellate courts, but

you can benchmark it and it's not an insignificant number.

I like to use the example of, I ran a non-DNA innocence clinic like two careers ago.

We know a lot about the rate of wrongful conviction as a result of the DNA exonerations over the last, I don't know, 30 years at this point, because there's a database now and we've been able to learn both like the rate at which mistakes are made.

Sometimes they're made by juries, but often they're made by judges.

and the kinds and qualities of the errors that lead to those mistakes.

And it's sort of a shocking number.

Like the wrongful convictions tell us that in three to 5% of cases, there was an error made.