But digging deeper for Florida data showed that we undercounted Florida reversals. Their cases are easy to track. It's harder to find reversals that release people from death row. Virtually none were police seizures of reliable evidence. Some readers ask valid questions.
Capital cases can go through three stages of court review.
Our data on how often retrial outcomes change cover verdicts thrown out at the second stage. The first level of court review catches the most glaring errors, so these reversals may lead to more, not fewer, changed outcomes. The third stage is similar to the second, so their retrial outcomes may be similar. It took time to document all such reversals that occurred between 1973 and 1995. There is evidence that our system of finding and curing errors has weakened, but there is no reason to think that cases reviewed in 1999 were less error prone than those in 1995.