Blackstone's Formulation: Let 10/100/1000 guilty men go to prevent innocent man's suffering?

trogdor9

A friend of mine was arguing about this, so I figured it would be a good discussion for these forums.

I'm going to guess that most people here will agree with Blackstone's formulation, but it makes for a good discussion anyway.

So, would you let 10-1,000 guilty men go to prevent the suffering/imprisonment/death of one innocent man? Personally, I believe that to disagree with Blackstone is to endorse a broken justice system, and to agree with it is to endorse a justice system that is not 100% effective. It's better to be less than fully effective than it is to be broken and harmful.

Apreche

The justice system should take the same approach as a spam filter. Most people are willing to deal with a few spam e-mails in the inbox as long as they have a guarantee that no real e-mails are going into the spam box. False negatives are ok, false positives are not ok.

It is impossible at this time to create a system that gets the right answer all the time. Therefore, the system must err on the side of not guilty.

Dkong

Most people are willing to deal with a few spam e-mails in the inbox as long as they have a guarantee that no real e-mails are going into the spam box.

I like this logic...