ABSTRACT
Yet, as we saw in earlier in the book, the criminal courts do not always work as intended. As Chapter 7 discussed, extralegal factors do affect court case outcomes, and the poor and people of color (with the findings on gender more complex) are sometimes more at risk for prosecution, conviction, and incarceration because of their lack of money and/or race and ethnicity. Innocent people are found guilty, as an estimated 1 percent of all felony convictions, or about 10,000 of the roughly 1 million convictions each year in the United States, are of innocent people (Huff 2002). Innocent people have probably also been executed, with at least a dozen innocent defendants estimated to have lost their lives between the 1970s and the end of the 1990s (Bohm 2007). Chapter 1 indicated that a central theme of law and society scholarship is that how law actually works is often very different from how it should ideally work. We have thus already seen that the criminal courts sometimes illustrate this theme, for better or worse, and will see more evidence of this theme in the sections that follow.
