Yesterday I heard Lisa Bloom on TruTV’s “Best Defense with Jamie Floyd” argue against juvenile “L-WOP” (Life Imprisonment Without Parole”) partly because she feels too many people are jailed for too long these days. To support the argument she claimed that 1 in 100 Americans are now incarcerated. She also argued that juveniles ought not to be sentenced to life imprisonment without chance of parole on grounds that our “changing standards of decency” make such a punishment “cruel and unusual.”

The weird thing is, for once I actually agree with much of what Ms. Bloom said, but since in the past I have found her to be statistically challenged I decided to check up on that 1% statistic.

Guess what? She is off by over 300%. In 2007 the number of Americans who were then incarcerated topped 3.2% (7 million adults). Ms. Bloom need not be ashamed: she is not the only lawyer with numerical dyslexia, nor is she the only American who is numerically challenged. I am, too, and I’m not even a lawyer.

• We definitely have an incarceration problem in this country, and it is getting worse all the time. It is one of the problems threatening to bankrupt us. I suspect that the largest group of convicts are doing time for drug-related offenses, and if we stopped incarcerating people for simple possession we would do ourselves a great favor.
• Worse yet, too many juveniles have contact with the prison system, not only as a result of being sentenced as adults but also as a result of visiting their convict parents in prison. I simply don’t understand how a family-court judge can “sentence” a child to visitation in a jail, but that is a topic for a separate blog article.

But I digress: Ms. Bloom’s topic was Graham v. Florida.

My topic is the way lawyers (including judges) throw around statistics in court extremely casually.

Take a look at the oral arguments in yesterday’s Graham v. Florida case. Graham’s attorney Bryan S. Gowdy argued that L-WOP had only been given to 30 juveniles in 6 states, thus proving his argument that L-WOP is so rare it is “cruel.” Chief Justice Roberts pointed out to him  that 38 states allow juvenile L-WOP (proving it isn’t rare at all). Gowdy corrected the Chief Justice: “30.” The Chief Justice persisted in saying it is 38 or 39, but also pointed out that 30 out of 50 is still “the vast majority.”

I am not a lawyer, but if I were and if I was arguing before the Supreme Court I certainly would not try to distort the numbers the way Mr. Gowdy did. I’m also very glad that the justices of the Supreme Court seem to have a better grasp of numbers than most lawyers.

• The Supreme Court only recently began making transcripts of oral arguments available online on the day of the argument. The Graham v. Florida oral arguments make strangely fascinating reading. I’m struck by the rhetoric of this particular courtroom drama: it looks to me as if Mr. Gowdy completely misjudged his audience.