It's not every day that a statistical study of the legal system makes front-page news in virtually every major newspaper in the United States, puts the authors on television, leads legislators in five states and the Congress to invite their testimony, and helps beget important new federal legislation. But that's what happened when, in June 2000, James S. Liebman, a professor at Columbia Law School; Jeffrey Fagan, a professor at the law school and at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health; and Valerie West, a doctoral candidate in sociology at New York University, released the first installment of their groundbreaking and voluminous study of errors in death-penalty cases in the United States. It was entitled A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995 (Liebman et al. 2000). The authors, joined by Columbia statistics professor Andrew Gelman, issued a second installment entitled A Broken System Part II: Wliy There Is So Much Error in Capital Cases and What Can Be Done About It which appeared in February 2002 (Liebman et al. 2002).
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