# Which concerns you more: Convicting the guilty or acquitting the innocent? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [September 21, 2014, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-concerns-you-more-convicting-the-guilty-or-acquitting-the-innocent/699060 "2014-09-21T03:20:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2014, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-concerns-you-more-convicting-the-guilty-or-acquitting-the-innocent/699060/41 "2014-09-23T19:53:42Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > It seems to me that if an innocent person has been convicted of a crime, then in the majority of cases the guilty party has escaped justice and will be more difficult to convict if ever identified. So of course it’s more important to acquit the innocent; making sure the wrong person is not being punished is nearly a prerequisite for convicting the guilty. That’s a good point. You can let a guilty person go unpunished without punishing an innocent person in his place. But punishing an innocent person almost always also involves letting a guilty person go unpunished. So convicting an innocent person is two injustices in one. ---
**Author:** ![Dale\_Sams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/779978/32.png) [@Dale\_Sams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dale_Sams)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2014, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-concerns-you-more-convicting-the-guilty-or-acquitting-the-innocent/699060/42 "2014-09-23T20:16:36Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > He didn’t know any better and he didn’t have the financial resources to go wiith anything other than the public defender the courts gave him. Like everyone, he thought that the prosecution could just present their noncase, the whole thing would be dismissed and life could go on as best as possible. Remember he just lost his wife, stepson and custody of his kids so not everything was going to be fine no matter what. Instead, the public defender didn’t do anything and let the corrupt prosecution run all over them with ridiculous theories that even the police at the scene would have disputed if they had gotten to testify. > > The summary of the facts are: my friend took his kids to school. The stepson refused to go with them because he was fighting with his mother over a cell phone. When my friend got back home 45 minutes later, the mother was dead in bed from a gunshot and the stepson was dead in the garage from a self-inflicted gunshot wound from his own hunting rifle to the bottom of his face with the rifle still sitting on his chest. My friend called 911. The police came and ruled it a murder-suicide because of the forensic facts but also because the stepson had a long history of severe behavioral issues. > > It should have been case closed at that point but a now proven corrupt prosecutor decided that someone needed to go to prison to rack up some conviction numbers. The invented this bizarre theory about my friend doing it and planting all of the evidence at the scene so that it just looked like a murder-suicide. One of the key pieces of evidence presented was that he ‘didn’t sound right’ on the 911 call whatever that is supposed to be. The other was that he often took his kids to dig for old artifacts at some abandoned house sites on their property as a hobby (just like almost all rural people do). The prosecution claimed those were premeditated mass gravesites and could only be the work of a carefully calculated killer. > > He has been in prison now for 7 years for a crime he didn’t commit. Even when he does get out, he has still lost much of his prime adulthood and missed a major portion of his kids growing up. It doesn’t work like the movies. Even if you do get out, it isn’t like the whole world will be waiting for you with open arms. The person who wants him out the least is his ex-MIL. She knows he didn’t do it but she lost her daughter and grandson but got custody of her grandchildren to raise because of it. She will lose that when he gets out so there can be no real winners. I’d ask you to message me the case name so I could study it…but all it would do is infuriate me. ---
**Author:** ![Loach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/loach/32/350_2.png) [@Loach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loach)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2014, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-concerns-you-more-convicting-the-guilty-or-acquitting-the-innocent/699060/43 "2014-09-23T20:28:53Z")
> [@jtur88](#): > > But the fact is, those that go to trial are, I believe, less than 5% of all criminal prosecutions. What is the mechanism for determining the actual guilt or innocence of those whose only options are to accept a shorter sentence or mortgage their parent’s house to pay for competent defense? > > As for the philosophical value of criminal punishment, advocates of high conviction rates need to explain their position on these two questions: > > 1. What is the value of a plea bargain, which significantly reduces the length of incarceration, and puts the guilty back on the streets sooner? > > 2. How many people are actually innocent, but are incarcerated after a plea bargain, how is that fact ascertained, and what is your source of that data? For one in my experience saying that getting a public defender is automatically a disadvantage is false. It’s more that having a high priced private lawyer gives you an advantage. Around here PD and ADAs seem about equal. Similar pay scales. Similar mix of new and experienced lawyers. Similar workloads. A high priced lawyer can afford to outwork an ADA. But I’m sure that is different from state to state and even county to county. What I am saying is that in 16 years of law enforcement (including several years as a detective) I have not had one case in which I was uncertain of the guilt of someone who was charged. Not because I am overly confident. Not because I think I’m Colombo. It’s because the vast majority of cases that have probable cause to get an indictment are clear cut. The ones that aren’t go unsolved. That is just the way real life works. I personally have not been involved in any cases that had much doubt to them. Maybe if a worked in a big city department or for the FBI and dealt routinely with more complex cases I may have had more of those types of cases. But in my experience most day to day cases are not that complex. I just went to the Grand Jury today. It was a burglary case that I thought for sure was going to go unsolved. It was closed out months ago. Then there was a hit on the fingerprints that were found. That is as simple as most cases are. Since the suspect had a pending case already in which he was caught breaking into cars by patrol officers I have a feeling that will be plea bargained and never see a trial. All I’m trying to say is that many have a skewed idea of what police investigations are like. There is no Holmesian deduction. There is a lot of boring work that will not make a good TV show. The types of cases that get Nancy Grace angry about don’t happen very often. As to the choices given, it’s my job to find the guilty in order to help the innocent. Unfortunately when we are talking about random crime finding the guilty is often impossible and there is nothing to be done about it. That’s just the way it is. I wish I could give more specific examples of what I mean but I don’t want to give to much information on cases I worked on. I don’t feel comfortable pinpointing where I work. If I ever had a doubt of the guilt of someone I would never recommend prosecution. ---
**Author:** ![TimeWinder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bcef8e/32.png) [@TimeWinder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TimeWinder)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2014, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-concerns-you-more-convicting-the-guilty-or-acquitting-the-innocent/699060/44 "2014-09-23T20:36:56Z")
I’ve read somewhere that this question is a canary, specifically that it’s one of the strongest predictors of political liberal vs. conservative positions–the answer to it has a much higher correlation with Democratic vs. Republican voting than even things like taxes, abortion, health care, welfare, immigration, and gun rights. I wonder if it’s true; but there’s not enough information in this poll to tell, and I don’t wonder enough to start my own. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2014, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-concerns-you-more-convicting-the-guilty-or-acquitting-the-innocent/699060/45 "2014-09-23T22:10:53Z")
> [@TimeWinder](#): > > I’ve read somewhere that this question is a canary, specifically that it’s one of the strongest predictors of political liberal vs. conservative positions–the answer to it has a much higher correlation with Democratic vs. Republican voting than even things like taxes, abortion, health care, welfare, immigration, and gun rights. I get the impression that our concern to avoid punishing the innocent—presumption of innocence in criminal trials; “better to let 10 guilty men go free than imprison one innocent man”; etc.—is a relatively recent phenomenon in the scale of human history. And if so, this may be because it derives from the importance/good of the individual, as opposed to that of the society/tribe/clan/nation. Punishing the innocent first and foremost hurts the innocent person who gets punished; letting the guilty go free hurts society as a whole. If I have a barrel of apples and am trying to throw out the rotten ones because “one bad apple spoils the barrel,” I’m much better off erring on the side of getting rid of a possibly non-rotten apple than leaving a possibly rotten one in the barrel. If individual people had no more inherent value than individual apples, I might advocate taking the same approach with human society. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2014, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-concerns-you-more-convicting-the-guilty-or-acquitting-the-innocent/699060/46 "2014-09-23T22:49:34Z")
As a related aside, the federal government pays $50,000 per year to innocent persons who are wrongfully incarcerated. About a dozen other states pay a similar amount, topped by Texas at $80K, but about half pay little or nothing. > **[When Innocent People Go To Prison, States Pay](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/06/16/320356084/when-innocent-people-go-to-prison-states-pay?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20140616)** > > How much money do people deserve when they serve time for crimes they didn't commit? Different states have different answers. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-concerns-you-more-convicting-the-guilty-or-acquitting-the-innocent/699060.md?page=2)