“Then let one innocent man be punished.”
With all due respect to those who believe in that saying, this is a foolish principle. If you let those 10 guilty men go free, they will in all probability go on to rob, rape, and kill many (much more than one) innocent people.
in certain instances, yes, it would make more sense to be stricter.
HOWEVER, not when capital punishment is at stake. The death penalty is incorrect so often that it seems like some sort of glorified crapshoot, no less dangerous than letting the guilty go free.
cant prove your innocence when you’re dead!
Tell it to the guy who got executed wrongly. Or his kids. Or his wife. Or his mother/father. :rolleyes:
Blalron: Let me know how you feel when you’re the one accused and facing trial for something you didn’t do. I’ve been in that situation and am glad my CO had a fondness for Logic at the time.
Of course they will, thus providing additional opportunities to be caught and punished later.
Since there’s no time machine yet, there’s a spectrum of certainty in prosecution, and I would go so far as to say that it’s axiomatic that no CJ system can determine guilt 100% accurately in all cases, no matter how Orwellian. The system is inherently flawed in its error and subjectivity.
Hence, presumption of innocence when in doubt seems reasonable enough to me. Certainly I consider the alternative, while equally flawed, to be much more dangerous.
If one doesn’t agree with or believe in that principle, then that person does not understand or believe in our system of justice.
It is part of the principle that “one is innocent until proven guilty”.
It is also why everyone is entitled to a lawyer and to a jury of one’s peers.
During a discussion tonight, my son said he’d read that 77 persons have been released from death row, since they have started reviewing cases using DNA.
To help you understand the basis for the OP’s quote, you might need to take a course in Probability and Statistics. Study hypothesis testing and confidence intervals, then come back and give your opinion after you understand what the OP’s snippet means. It was not a foolish statement.
You are assuming that we have 100% certainty in whether a person is innocent or guilty. We do not.
We assume that a man is innocent, this is the null hypothesis. It takes a preponedrance of evidence to prove the alternative hypothesis, that he is guilty. We keep the confidence level high to prevent innocent people from being convicted WRONGLY of crimes they did not commit. When they are accused of committing capitol offenses, we should by all means make the confidence level extremely high.
Convicting an innocent man is a Type I error, a very serious mistake. Releasing a guilty man is a Type II error, not exactly what we want either but not as terrible. Unfortunately they are inversely related so if you want to raise the certainty that innocent people are not imprisoned, you have to diminish the certainty that guilty people always are imprisoned.
As others have said, you wouldn’t think this were foolish if you were standing trial for something you didn’t do.
Could you give a link/source for your type I/ type II statements? Thanks.
samclem,
You can get some background on hypothesis testing (and related errors) at
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lane/hyperstat/A29337.html
http://www.stats.gla.ac.uk/steps/glossary/hypothesis_testing.html
The Type I / Type II depends on what you make your null hypothesis, in the case of US law innocense is assumed the null and guilt is the alternative.
Type I is almost always considered a more serious error statistically, in the case of guilt or innocense I consider it very serious.
It’s been a couple of years since I had this class, anyone correct me if I’ve made a mistake please.
The type1/type2 terminology isn’t very useful here since the issue is precisely how much more undesirable Type 1 Errors are compared to Type 2 errors in this particular context. That is a political and criminological issue not a statistical one and the statistical terms state the question; but don’t answer it.
As for saying “how would you feel if you were wrongly punished” sure I would feel rotten but no more rotten then I was killed or robbed by a criminal who was mistakenly set free.
There are costs to both letting innocents get punished and the guilty getting off free and the real issue is the quantitative trade-off between the two. Just cavalierly saying that it’s better that 10 guilty go free is an assertion and not an argument. Why 10 and not 100 or for that matter 3?
There was a good Steven Landsburg column making this exact point in Slate a couple of years back. Maybe I will dig it up if I can.
Cool. How about you volunteer to be the innocent that gets punished? And since this is most often applied to the death penalty, that means you are going to be put to death! But now that we have this great new policy, you’re probably feeling pretty good about your sacrifice, seeing as you’re part of a plan that will prevent more crime. Nice knowing ya! Send us a note from the other side!
Sigh…
This is why I pointed out the very useful methods of hypothesis testing. Guilt or innocense is not a known fact, they are both hypothesis, and their relative certainty is important. In simple statistical analysis of a subject, 95% confidence is the standard. With something like matters dealing with someone’s life or death, that confidence should be much higher.
The “10 guilty free rather than 1 innocent punished” is actually too low of a confidence level. We require higher than that just to prove whether or not one new drug is better than the old. Surely we should accept better than this quantitatively when we discuss imprisoning or killing people.
Again, we are not actually talking about “guilty people” being set free. We are talking about the relative uncertainty of their guilt, and it is best to err on the side of innocense. Instead of saying, “those ten murderers will go on to kill again”, we should be saying, “those ten people will go on to continue their normal lives rather than being incorrectly convicted of a crime they did not commit”
crap, I think I messed that up
I happen to agree with Blalron as regards the op. The 10 vs. 1 is just a number made up in order to express a sentiment, but since the number is out there we can use it.
Since this topic seems to be moving towards the death penalty and away from other crimes I’ll address that. If you have 11 people on death row for say, homocide or homocide and rape and 10 are guilty by saying these 10 can now go free so that the one innocent is not punished you have now not punished the 10 who did do something. The people who suffered at their hands have received nothing like justice.
In addition if even one of those murderers kill just one more person, then you are left with a situation where no matter what choice you made, one innocent person is dead and one family grieves.
A justice system based on this philosophy protects citizens from the abuses of the system, but not from criminals. In my mind a justice system should be about punishing crime.
If I knew that the guilty were being punished and I was just a mistake I could easily go to my death knowing that its for the greater good.
Of course, correct functioning of the justice system seperate from its philosophy is a different topic.
Once again asserting that “95% confidence limits are standard” just avoids the problem. You are making an assumption about th relative costs of type1 error and type 2 errors without backing it up with specific evidence from the specific criminal problem we are interested in. Things like 95% confidence intervals are statistical conventions whereas what you need to make policy is cost-benefit analysis
“Again, we are not actually talking about “guilty people” being set free”
This is precisely what the famous quote discussed in the OP is saying.
It is an assertion about the relative costs of guilty people going free as opposed to innocent people being punished.
Yeah, so? Are you so obsessed with punishing the guilty that you are willing to sacrifice yourself as the the 10th innocent man?
So it becomes a simple equation… which is the greater injustice: failing to punish the guilty, or punishing the innocent? And you really believe that it is MORE JUST to punish and INNOCENT person than to fail to punish the guilty? Just to illustrate the point and help you look at it from a new perspective, let’s say that the punished innocent is a 7 year old girl named Belinda. Is it better to see her fry in the electric chair if it means that 10 guys who killed 10 other 7 year old girls go free?
There is injustice in both positions, do you not see this?
If, if, if. Lotta ifs.
And in my mind, a justice system should be about protecting everyone from injustice of all kinds.
Glad you think so.
Sad you place such a high value on punishment and so little on justice.
Any justice system that is even remotely effective is going to convict and sentence innocent people. If you set the standards so high that absolutly no innocent people are wrongly convicted, then the only criminals who will be convicted are those who have the poor sense to comit their crime in full view of three impartial witnesses, leave biological evidence, and be taken into custody at the scene of the crime.
In a backhanded way, the Inquisition was the result of a too zealous desire to keep from ever convicting innocent people: 15th and 16th C courts requiered a confession or the testimony of two eyewitnesses in order to convict. The standard was so high that it was unmeetable, and since the vast, vast majority of people thought a crime was being comited that threatened the very lifes of the entire community, it was almost logical to commit terrible, terribe things (torture) in order to reach that standard of proof (torture often resulted in both a confession and eyewitness testimony about other witches). The convoluted legal restrictions regarding the use of torture (which, to be fair, were often ignored or stretched past breaking) reflect the desire of Early Modern judges to come up with a way to simutainously 1) stop (what they sincerely believed was) a serious problem and 2) insure that the innocent were not convicted.
So basically you have to balence the two things, and and try of define “sufficient evidence” at the the sweet spot where you stop enough criminals to justify the number of innocents that are punished. Is it 10-to1? 100-to-1? 1000-to1? Hell if i know, but I do know that what was a good and suffcient ratio shifts over time: it is fortunate that we live in a time when forensic advances such as fingerprints and DNA evidence have allowed us to increase the bar on what, exactly, is sufficient evidence. There are many innocent people free today who would have been convicted of crimes 100 years ago, because by the standards of the time, they had reached the sufficent evidnece criteria. That’s a limit of science, not morality, and an illustration of why even if 100% accuracy in a justice system is not possible, it is worth striving for.
Stoid:
Well, yes, Stoid, it should be, but as iimperfect mortals we also have to come up with a justice system that works. And in order to do that, we are going to have to accept that some innocent people are going to be wrongly convicted. It sucks. It really, really sucks. But the price of letting everyone who might even possibly be innocent go free is to release almost everybody., and in communities with virtually no law enforement at all, the people that get no justice are the small, the weak, and the young.
To put this in more real-world terms, if Belinda’s story-the evidence avalivble-- matches that of 100 other girls who really are being raped by their fathers, but by sheer bad luck in Belinda’s case it really is a case of a vindictive former girlfriend of the father’s and an inexpert psycologist unknowingly leading the witnesses, well, then, I’d prefer that Belinda was removed from her home unjustly than that those 100 other girls were left in thiers.
Now, we can argue about whether the standard should be 1 other girl or 10000 other girls, or somewhere in between, and we can argue about whether the standard should be different for different crimes. Lots of rooms for different opinions here. But you can’t just say “The system needs to be perfect, anything less is unacceptable.”
Interestingly enough, I had a dream last night that I was an innocent man on death row. My appeals had ran out, and my lawyer was trying to get ahold of the governor at the 11th hour. It was awfull. I’m reconsidering my opinion about the death penalty because of this… heh.