1) I simply don't have time to read the citations of everything I read (and then check the citations' citations).
2) Even with a solid factual basis, it's easy to twist and spin and fool people who lack expertise in the field. For example, the author could simply omit essential facts.
I've not been able to find the number of rape convictions in 2012. I found a claim of 85000 rapes in 2012 [1], and claims that 3-10% of rapes lead to a conviction.
If one really wanted to do this right, it would be necessary to look at what fraction of those who are convicted and claim they are innocent are able to get a retroactive DNA test on the evidence, and also take into account that such testing often comes after years in prison and so the comparison should be taking into account the rape convictions in the year that someone was sentenced, not the year they their conviction was overturned.
Considering that I was not even able to find a good number on the number of convictions by year, though, I have no hope of reasonably finding the information necessary for the aforementioned analysis. I've been noticing this kind of thing (not being able to find some statistics that I would have expected to be trivially findable in an intuitively obvious way by the most casual searcher) happening quite a lot over the last couple of years, and it puzzles me.
