I’d easily let 1000 guilty go free. I can’t believe this country still has the death penalty if for no other reason than the sentence can’t be revoked if new evidence comes to light.
Actually, the 1000-1 ratio provided by this hypothetical makes the answer relatively easy to assess, particularly if certain effects could be calculated with a reasonable degree of realism and accuracy.
For example, if a mere 100 of those 1000 guilty (but unproven to be) so capital crime committing perps murdered one innocent person each after release, then letting the 1000 guilty capital crime perps go free ends up being one hundred times worse than executing an innocent person.
In this case, One hundred innocent persons would perish as a result of the legal system having faithfully observed this “better 1000-1” doctrine.
The “break even” value is easily calculated and can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, and with geometric logic, that: -
Setting <10 guilty persons free is better than executing one innocent person.
Setting 10 guilty persons free is equally as bad as executing one innocent person.
Setting >10 guilty persons free is worse than executing one innocent person.
Now, where did I put my ball bearings?
First off, the “A or B” fallacy of the OP title. If you put the 1,000 men in jail, then no one dies and no one goes free. If they’re later found to be innocent, then just the innocent ones get to go free. Sounds right, doesn’t it?
Then you have the standard arguments against the death penalty, all of which I agree with:
A. In the US, it ends up costing more anyway.
B. Innocent people get killed.
C. It doesn’t really work as a deterrent.
D. Only a few “advanced” countries still have it: the US, Japan (rarely used), and anywhere else? We look stupid and barbaric to the Europeans for having it.
And my arguments:
E. It really is barbaric and has a generally demoralizing and negative effect on the general population. It creates a pageant of death in which the original crime become obscured by both sides going at it over the punishment. I hardly think it’s worth it. Why should convicted killers have candle-lit vigils in their honor? Pen them and forget about them.
F. It requires non-experts to kill people whose innocence they know nothing about. If you look at who designs the equipment and performs the executions, they are often amateurs who quite often botch the process. In my view, also, if you are going to kill someone, you need to take personal responsibility for that. Just having some judge say that it’s “OK” is not good enough.
G. Having the death penalty in place is a constant invitation to unethical use thereof by bad people. Saying this can’t happen in the US, because we’re “good,” is naive. Think of Abu Graib.
Death penalty, be gone.
I fullheartedly agree with all your points. There has often been debate in India about the necessity and effectiveness of the death penalty, but it always gets lost in politics 
I have just one question, re: F - amateurs design and perform the executions? And often screw up? I’m not doubting you… I just find it hard to believe!
No, you don’t let them out. But you don’t kill them. Why is that so hard for the death squad types to understand?
If by “go free” you mean remain the 1000 remain in prison for life rather than be executed, then I say “go free”.
If “go free” means open the gate and let them out, the innocent man dies and the 1000 stay in jail.
Aeschines
The OP had nothing to do with your: “put the 1000 men in jail” claim. It was about letting 1000 guilty men go FREE.
That makes nonsense of the rest of your thesis, doesn’t it?
Besides, if a 1000 guilty perps are regularly let loose by an over cautious legal system to go forth and cause mayhem, then the rule of law does not prevail and there would be enough death and destruction to satisfy anyone.
Suppose you are the innocent person being executed? Would you feel the same way?
Exactly. Thanks for making that point on my behalf.
I’ve noticed that I’ve been agreeing with your posts a lot lately. I may need to get my “political compass” recalibrated… 
Suppose you or your child were killed by a guilty person being set free. Would you feel the same way?
Good question. BUT- I’m not advocating that guilty go free. I’m saying that executing the innocent doesn’t have to happen because it isn’t necessary to execute anybody. If my child were killed and the murderer went free, I would feel much the same as Fred Goldman. But I would always hope that the perpetrator was caught. I would feel worse if someone was wrongly executed for killing my child.
Thank you. Glad to see that somebody reads.
Ah, but are you willing the BE that one innocent man?
I think that this is the crux of the question. It’s easy to consign someone you don’t know to a fate like execution for a crime they are innocent of, but what if it were you? Or your father? or your brother? or your son?
If I could see into people’s heads and see The Truth, I might be willing to concede the death penalty as a legitimate law enforcement tool. But I can’t. As far as I know, neither can anyone else. So until then, it should go. Even one man is to much.
I’ve often been told that none of the folks are death row are truly innocent. Many of them have had priors, a history of some sort or another with the system, so even if they didn’t do this crime, they’d done something to deserve it. It just seems like rationalization- because deep down, we know that knowingly implementing a system where we execute people innocent of the crimes they have been convicted of is simply Evil.
I also think that there is a false dilemma being created here- as was pointed out, no one is ‘going free’- they are just not being killed.
In retrospect, I could have just quoted BobLibDem, slapped a ‘ditto’ at the bottom, and called it a day.
Apparently you don’t watch horror movies.
I have the optimal solution: I would neither let the guilty go free, nor would I kill the innocent man. Everyone wins.
The problem here is that the number one criminal - a state that kills people - never gets punished and kills again and again and again. So much for your happy 0% there.
I find this question one of the toughest out there. I honestly do not know.
Here’s a question, though, for those who’d prefer to let the guilty go free. Were any of you using similar logic in your decision to be for or against the Iraq war? I ask this, because perhaps the biggest reason I was against it was because of the inevitable innocent Iraqi civilian deaths that I assumed would happen. I suppose those who are for the war in order to take bad guy Saddam out made the decision that innocent deaths as a result of taking him into custody were acceptable, or at least less than the civilian deaths they though Saddam would be the cause of in the future. There are some analogous aspects to the question in the OP, I feel.
According to this site 6.6% of all murderers released from prison were rearrested for a new murder. Using your thought process (If I understand it), then the release of 1,000 guilty murderers would result in 66 more people killed by those murderers. Keeping the same rate, for every 15.1515… murderers released from prison, another victim will be killed. Should that imply that the proper standard should be “Better that 15.15151515… guilty people go free than one innocent be killed?”
A lot of guilty people go free because we don’t have enough evidence to convict them. Theoretically, we could fix this problem by lowering the burden of proof from “beyond a reasonable doubt” to “preponderance of the evidence”, making it merely more likely than not that the person committed the crime. Presumably this would save lives as well. Would anybody advocate this?
When I saw your name, pravnik, I knew I’d been beaten to the punch. But, as is my style, I’d elaborate more.
The essential question is a nice, abstract sort of moral dilemma–but in practice, “guilt” or “innocence” are not obvious, objective qualities but rather inter-subjective appraisals that need to be made. In short, determining guilt or innocence is a decision procedure we more or less agree upon because we do not have a pure perspective from which to judge.
In such a case, the question is rather, “Would you rather we raise our standards of proof so that it is more difficult for anyone to be prosecuted?” Or, contrariwise, “Would you rather lower our standard of proof, so that more people can be prosecuted?” I just saw a case on CourtTV last night where a man was acquitted of all charges–only later did irrefutable evidence arise and he confessed. Except for that pesky fifth amendment, we’d prosecute him. Should we remove protection from double jeapordy?
The question, in an abstract, is an interesting one. But putting any answer in to practice, one realizes that what is at stake is the burden of proof the state is compelled to meet. For example, shifting “beyond a reasonable doubt” to “a preponderance of evidence”, or lie detectors being admissable in all courts (not all accept them), removing barriers to search and siezure (not that these are that big anyway), and so on. The question is not whether we punish the innocent in order to get more guilty people, but how, precisely, we will convict more people in our justice system, what barriers we would like removed in order to make this “sacrifice”. Similarly, for those of us who favor the innocent over the guilty, should we increase the burden on the state, restrict their abilities more, and so on?
I don’t believe in punishment for its own sake. If I knew for sure that there wasn’t going to be any recidivism, or that the commission of the crimes of which they were guilty was not indicative of an attitude to tendency that made it highly likely that they’d do something downright evil but of a different nature, I’d not only let a thousand guilty people go free to avoid roasting one innocent person, I’d let a couple hundred octillion guilty people go free to avoid detaining one innocent person for more than 48 hours in uncomfortable surroundings.
Recidivism changes the picture, of course.
I have the same problem with capital punishment that many other people have (it’s hard to say “oops” if you realize you hung the wrong cowboy) but I also have major problems with imprisonment: unless it’s permanent, it’s a pisspoor deterrent for recidivism, it’s cruel, it’s expensive, and it actually, by making the people subject to it less able to obtain employment, makes its alumni more likely to commit subsequent crimes for reasons that have little to do with whatever they originally did. And, of course, as with capital punishment, it horrible if you do this to an innocent person.
Problem is, we need to respond to criminal behavior somehow. I may be an anarchist but I’m a pragmatic anarchist, and for the time being we do need to have our laws enforced.
We need to rethink how we do prisons.