She increased the investigation and conviction of fraud cases, and she achieved the highest national record of locating deadbeat parents for collecting child support.
First, nothing prevents a particularist from being of firm conviction case by case; an unbudgeable conviction need not be founded on principle, but simply on the nature of the case.
The new analysis confirms that on a more usual definition of conviction rate – the proportion of cases prosecuted in the courts – 62.5% of rape cases ended in a conviction, eight points higher than in 2005.
One conviction in that batch of cases, involving an Italian immigrant who'd registered as a Republican, resulted in a $200 fine.
The bad news for him is that "the vast majority of federal criminal cases result in a conviction — around 95-97 percent of cases," Ghappour said, but ultimately, the outcome will "depend on whether the court can navigate the case away from the uncharged allegations" against him, referring to the alleged gangland hits.
"Worldwide, millions of people are imprisoned for minor, non-violent drug-related offenses, in spite of the international drug control conventions' provisions permitting to apply alternatives to conviction in cases of 'minor nature,' " it says.
The drive to streamline the justice system became easier, Mr. Williams and Justice McCaffery said, after an investigative series by The Philadelphia Inquirer last December found that the city had failed to obtain convictions in two-thirds of cases involving violent crimes, and that thousands of cases were dismissed because prosecutors were not prepared or witnesses did not appear.
County prosecutors have used evidence from this network to bolster convictions in a number of cases.
Of course, the high public profile of the Lawrence case made conviction of the killers imperative: the case had attained the status of a litmus test for the capacity of the legal system to deliver justice for a victim of a racist attack.
And although more cases which get to the courts are resulting in conviction there are still too few convictions compared to the number of cases reported and, as this figure makes clear, still far too many rapes which are not reported at all.
