China's low acquittal rates: interesting statistics | The China Collection

Not a defense of China, but to broaden the reference: Federal Judge Jed Rakoff points out that prosecutors in the US have the whip had.  Under 5% go to trial, making the U.S. acquittal rate less substantial than appears at first glance. - gwc
China's low acquittal rates: interesting statistics | The China Collection
by Prof. Donald Clarke

I’ve been looking through a recent massive collection of Chinese court statistics going from 1949 to 2016 (人民法院司法统计历史典籍) (“People’s Court Historical Statistics” or “PCHS”) and will be posting from time to time on interesting finds. This post will be about acquittal rates, because the statistics show something interesting and counterintuitive: that acquittal rates were higher in the Mao era than in the post-Mao era, and have been historically and extremely low in the last several years.

First, some general remarks on acquittal rates. Acquittal rates in China have always been low—under 0.2% every year from 2006 to 2016—but the question is what conclusions one can draw from that.

Without information on what kinds of cases are brought to trial—information that only in-depth fieldwork would reveal—it’s hard to know what to make of acquittal rates. It is theoretically possible that doubtful cases are never brought to trial, although well-publicized cases of miscarriages of justice make that hypothesis a bit implausible. But just how implausible is impossible to say.

The acquittal rate in the United States is much higher: in federal courts, a recent study found that the average conviction rate in jury cases was 84%, while judges convicted slightly more than 50% of the time; a quick Google search finds estimates of the overall acquittal rate ranging from 17% to about 25%. (I have not researched this extensively and would welcome better numbers.)

A Caixin report on acquittal rates from 2016 (link now dead) cites figures for other countries, including 2% in Finland, 9% in the US, and a whopping 25% in Russia.

East Asian countries have much lower acquittal rates. Consider this report on South Korea:

Prosecutors normally indicted only when they accumulated what they considered overwhelming evidence of a suspect’s guilt. The courts, historically, were predisposed to accept the allegations of fact in an indictment. This predisposition was reflected in both the low acquittal rate–less than 0.5 percent–in criminal cases and in the frequent verbatim repetition of the indictment as the judgment. The principle of “innocent until proven guilty” applied in practice much more to the pre-indictment investigation than to the actual trial.

The acquittal rate in Japan is less than 1 percent. (For a good study of the Japanese criminal prosecution system, see David Johnson, The Japanese Way of Justice: Prosecuting Crime in Japan (2002), reviewed here.)