alt Hacker NewsThere’s a functional difference if you’re trying to compute “tough-on-innocence statistics”, because it means that the target for the only possible metric is much higher than zero. A healthy criminal justice system should routinely rule people innocent; if nearly everyone who’s prosecuted is found guilty, that doesn’t mean prosecutors are being really picky about filing charges, it means the system doesn’t treat innocence as an acceptable outcome.
You'd be better off assessing that via analysis of laws and policies. That would show what could be abused and to what degree, even if it's abused by the people in power now. That's really the whole point of the analysis - to create laws and policies with better protections, so we should measure what we're looking to change.