Your figures aren't quite correct, judging from a Department of Justice website I just visited.
Looking at the year 2004 statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics [http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/fed.htm] it says the following:
"..Cases were terminated against 83,391 defendants during 2004. Most (90%) defendants were convicted. Of the 74,782 defendants convicted, 72,152 (or 96%) pleaded guilty or no-contest. ..."
Now if you apply some rudimentary math to those numbers, they say:
- a 90% overall conviction rate
- all but 4% of the convictions were obtained by pressuring for a guilty plea
- for the remaining cases not pleaded out, the Feds obtained 2,630 convictions against 8609 acquittals (or otherwise-dropped cases without getting a conviction). That equals a 23% conviction rate specifically against those accused who fought the case and did not plead guilty.
When the feds draft something, it results in a conviction rate over 94%.
Your figures aren’t quite correct, judging from a Department of Justice website I just visited.
Believe what you want. My percentage is based on a couple of decades, not a single year cherry picked....(pun)