To me, losing life, freedom or property at the hands of the state for a crime one didn’t commit is an injustice so terrible that it far out-weighs the risk of letting a few guilty people go free. I agree with Blackstone and kayaker.
I don’t think you’ll get any surprises as to who, on this board, favours punishing people regardless of the consequences, though. My guess would be it’ll line up strongly with political bent - the proportions seem about right for the ratios in various Left/Right polls, IIRC.
Sure, as a general rule, but there’s still the potential for a few surprises. Just last week we had ElvisL1ves beating the drum for conviction of a person for whom he couldn’t even describe exactly what law the guy was supposed to have broken.
Surprises? Oh, I bet you would.
But if restricted to this liberally bent board, you might be right.
AND, if you are right, for me, that just confirms that the opinions are political rather than reasons of reality & so called justice.
It is the old, ‘one life is worth any cost’ chant that has no place in reality or this world or this country.
YMMV 
* of course it does *
The legal system’s motto ought to be something like a doctor’s: First, do no harm.
So we want it to be right, but if we’re going to make a mistake, missing the occasional conviction is better than convicting the occasional innocent.
Another related topic that isn’t expressly covered by the poll options: The system needs to protect freedoms and civil liberties. Even if a law like “The police can search your house any time they want to” or “No citizen is allowed outside after dark” leads to more convictions of bad guys, it’s just not something we should tolerate. Up to a certain point, I’m willing to concede a little bit of crime to protect basic freedoms.
Yes, yes, yes!
The way I see it if a guilty person is set free it’s bad. But let’s face it, there are already criminals out in society - one more isn’t going to be significant. Maybe if there was only one criminal in the entire country and we’d eliminate all crime by locking him up, then I could see the point of going to extreme lengths to convict him.
Another factor is that even career criminals are not constantly committing crimes. But an innocent person in prison is an ongoing crime.
Definitely acquitting the innocent. Punishing the guilty doesn’t really do much good aside from appeasing society’s need for retribution. A society that hurts innocent people so they can assure they can punish all the guilty is a sick society.
I somehow misread the poll question and picked the wrong one.
In the next 50 years, there will be 800,000 homicides committed in the USA by people who have never served prison time until now. In half of them, the perpetrator will never be known, they will remain unsolved. Assuming the average sentence for homicide to be 20 years, in the past 20 yeas there have been 300,000 homicides, only 150,000 of those committed by someone now in prison. There are now 150,000 people walking around free who have murdered someone, and are not even suspected of any wrongdoing. All we have is a body and a cold case. So even if every murderer is let off without any prison time (in fact half of them are), only about 1/5 of all future murders would be committed by a known murderer who had been set free.
I don’t understand why some people don’t opt for a bench trial rather than a jury one.
There are a few Forensic Files eps called "Overturned convictions’. I watched two and I can’t watch anymore because they make my blood boil.
In both cases the defendant should have opted for a bench trial because his ‘peers’ wanted nothing but to convict the guy because being in a small community they were tainted as hell.
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.
You could certainly make that argument. The murder victims are already dead; no punishment can bring them back. Keeping the murderer in jail for many years consumes already scarce resources, while having him free enables him (in this hypothetical) to make a positive contribution to society.
Having been on all sides of the court at one time or another (defendant, juror, prosecuting) I wish our system had the option of “Innocent”. In other words, three tiered on the decision side. It would make some cases easier to accept or understand.
In general, I support the basic idea that I’ve heard expressed similarly to “better to let 10 guilty men go free than imprison one innocent man”. As such, I voted for acquitting the innocent. So while it’s clearly not equal and should be favored towards that, that doesn’t mean I’m willing to accept any number of false negatives to avoid even one false positive. That is, it is impossible to assure we will never falsely convict someone without having what I expect would be an unacceptable rate of false acquittals. Even with some false convictions, we have some extra safeguards, like appeals and pardons.
Unfortunately, I think there’s a lot of problems getting in the way of finding an ideal balance. There’s overzealous district attorneys that will pursue convictions with little regard to whether it makes sense, or there’s poorly written laws or whatever.
I mis-interpreted the choices. I would like to change my answer to acquitting the innocent.
Convicting the guilty. It’s kind of my thing. Unlike you see on TV or even on the news, knowing who the bad guy is just isn’t that difficult in most cases that have enough evidence to go to trial. Circumstantial cases that are complex and difficult do not make up the majority of cases. But of course they get a lot of the attention because a whodunnit is more compelling than an open and shut case that is usually handled before trial.
Is this equivalent to asking which bothers me more: an innocent person being unjustly punished or a guilty person getting away with it? If so, then I can readily answer that an innocent person being punished bothers me more; so acquitting the innocent concerns me more.
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:
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What is the value of a plea bargain, which significantly reduces the length of incarceration, and puts the guilty back on the streets sooner?
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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?
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.