People here don’t assume good faith, for good reason, as they rarely receive it, especially from people outside the forum. I don’t mind taking a chance particularly if it is something I actually enjoy talking about.

It definitely does to the private prisons. That is what I found so interesting about the article you posted. Despite the fact that we have become more sure of our convictions (as exonerations are less likely and take longer) the length of the lived prison sentence has grown. There is clearly an additional financial factor at play here than simply a ‘Well we have to satisfy the 6th amendment.’ because usually that is based on a ‘procedural’ and ‘reasonableness’ standard (with those standards being set by the state), which was clearly being satisfied before, but now is not despite the improvement of certainty.

My general interest would be seeing if you cut the numbers from states like Ohio who have the chemical execution issue, if the numbers change drastically in any way, as that could complicate the analysis and then point more towards either a legal cause or financial cause. The large issue with any statistical data is that there are a variety of factors at play and any one of them could be the primary causal factor. My money would still be on a primarily financial factor (as all things being equal material concerns trump ideological concerns) but you never know until you really scrape the numbers.