They are seeing defendants falling foul of a perverse incentive to plead guilty and swallow a £150 charge for a summary offence rather than risk conviction and a £520 charge after trial.
"We are greatly concerned that innocent people risk conviction, and are left without a defense," Troy Barber, a steering committee member at Sensible Washington, said in an e-mail.
Even the act of speaking to journalists, as Mohammed Abdel Marla al-Hariri experienced last month, risk conviction of treason by the Assad regime.
There would be no injustice, Condorcet argued, in exposing innocent defendants to a risk of conviction equal to risks they voluntarily assume without fear, such as crossing the English Channel from Dover to Calais.
To examine a potential bias associated with undiagnosed KS and 47,XYY cases, we performed a sensitivity analysis, assuming that the risk of conviction among undiagnosed cases is smaller than the risk observed among diagnosed cases, and we applied the statistical uncertainty from the observed data expressed by the SE of the ln(HR) estimate.
Although the petitioner was not convicted of the greater charge on retrial whereas Green was, the risk of conviction on the greater charge was the same in both cases, and the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment is written in terms of potential or risk of trial and conviction, not punishment.
She also points out that they have a higher risk of conviction, since they're more likely to be stopped.
"This is definitely not a normal trial procedure, so I feel the risk of conviction is high," she added.
Thus a man found buying sex would not immediately be criminalised but would receive a stern warning and would know that he risked a conviction.
To do otherwise — to ask for a verdict that the prosecutor herself would not render — risks wrongful convictions and undermines the integrity of the system itself.
