> I am pretty sure clerks are seeing only a fraction of the people who were arrested or convicted, and that that fraction is strongly biased towards people who have money to spend on lawyers.
The bulk of nearly any judge's case load is criminal appeals from run of the mill criminals. They might be pro se, they might have a public defender, they might have a cheap local lawyer, but they're not deep pocketed by any means. Indeed, clerks see a skewed picture of things, but one that is if anything skewed towards seeing fewer actually guilty people, not more, for the obvious reason that actually innocent people are more likely to file an appeal than actually guilty ones.
> I do not know where you got the idea that our criminal justice system is serving its purpose. It may be great at putting criminals in prison, but it is meant to protect innocent.
The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the law-abiding public by putting criminals in prison. That is its sole reason for existing. An important constraint in doing so is protecting the innocent, but that's not its purpose. If it were, then you could design the perfect justice system simply by never putting any people in prison. But the world has bad people, lots of them, and that's not a tenable option.
You design a justice system the same way you design any system. You pick a false-positive rate you can live with, then design the rest of the system to maximize throughput while still hitting that false-positive target. It's the only sane way to design something that works as opposed to a non-working platonic ideal.