But would you feel guilty if you got it wrong, and the guy went on to murder someone else? Would you feel as though that blood was on your hands?
I can’t take what someone might do in the future as a reason to punish them for what they may have done in the past, otherwise, it would make sense to start locking up some particular at risk populations and demographics pro-actively, and that’s a road I don’t like going down. If the group needs to be judged as a group, then I cannot find the group guilty.
To add to (and not fight) the hypothetical, what if you did know which one of them was innocent? You still have to sentence or free them all, but you know for sure that Bob, defendant #42, is absolutely innocent of the crime he is accused.
To be fair, if this were the only legal system that we had, where we always had one innocent mixed in with a bunch of guilty, all sharing the same punishment, then I may choose differently, as it would mean that no one would ever be held to account for any crime, but in a one-off situation, I would have to acquit.
Again, no, why would/should I? I had reasonable doubts after all. If I actually did think the person was guilty of murder then I wouldn’t have reasonable doubts that they were, so I’d vote to convict.
Um…they are murderers by the OP. For sure, plain and simple. You are turning them free KNOWING they are murderers. I’d have to say that if you can do something like that and handwave away the consequences by telling yourself you can’t punish them for both something they have done and for their future acts which you facilitated, then we are just very different people.
Not sure in that case, but most likely I’d abstain in that case unless forced literally at gun point from including Bob. I suppose at a certain point with enough pressure I’d vote to incarcerate Bob as well, even knowing that he was innocent if that meant getting 99 other absolute murderers off the street. As I said earlier, if I was Bob I’d take one for the team…I hope Bob would understand but probably not and I’d have to live with the guilt. But I’d rather both Bob and I lived with the guilt and anger than some 3rd party was killed because I turned 99 other murderers loose on society. YMMV obviously.
It IS the legal system we have. We know, for a fact, that some people caught in the gears are innocent of the crimes they were convicted of. Some were guilty of stupid crimes like using weed. We know that, changing the speed limit from 55 to 70 WILL kill some number of people. We know that allowing citizens to own and keep guns will cause deaths. We know that allowing people to simply drink sodas with sugar are going to cause deaths. As a society we make tradeoffs all the time. Which means that, sadly, some number of people are going to serve time for crimes they didn’t commit (or for stupid crimes society wants to punish them for). To me, allowing 99 murderers out is a greater of the two evils…one person suffers to ensure that those 99 don’t make someone else suffer. It’s worth the cost, just as our legal system, much as I rail against it, is worth the cost compared to the alternative. Again, YMMV.
It leaves a lot of room for disagreement. First, my remarks were about the full spectrum of American Justice, in which, regardless oi the crime, incarceration is the knee-jerk response. Homicide is just one of the many facets to which this is mercilessly applicable. Americans are uncomfortably prone to seeking punishment as the first recourse, whenever a social conflict arise. We’ve even developed a whole vocabulary entry (“closure”) around it, to make sure victims get suitably stroked by ultimate punishment.
Second, given that in some 80% of all homicides, perps and victims are known to or associates of each other, typically in an underworld environment, there is a reasonable expectation that some, if not a lot, of the victims deserved their deliverance as much as the assailant deserves “the full extent of the law”. Which leaves a great deal of room for disagreement.
You did overlook it. Table 9, page 9, second cite breaks down the recidivism rate by offense - including parole violation. Table 10 shows the stats by type of first conviction and type of subsequent conviction. My numbers come from these tables. For instance, one convicted of a violent crime is more likely to reoffend with another violent crime (33.1%) than any other type of crime, including public order offenses (which combines parole violations, DUI, weapons, etc).
It is interesting that when you know that one of them is innocent, you are willing to sentence them all without too much difficulty, but when you know which one is innocent, you find it more difficult. Not criticizing, and I think that would be the case for most people, just finding it interesting, is all. Personally, I don’t feel that it changes the calculus, but then, I’m for freeing them all anyway, so it wouldn’t, would it?
It is the legal system that we have, precisely because a large number of people are willing to punish the innocent in order to make sure the guilty are punished. On a left leaning fairly anti-authoritarian board, we still have nearly half of respondents saying that they would send them all to prison. I expect that in gen pop it is closer to 80% or more. We then typically don’t care about the convict. Most people don’t really care what happens behind prison doors, and go so far as to make jokes about prison rape, assaults, and murders, because in their eyes, the convict is not a human like you or me to be empathized with, but a monster, worse than an animal, who needs to be punished in a dark hole for his transgression of being convicted.
All of your examples, from speed limits to sodas, are things that society allows, because society does not take away freedoms without compelling reason. What we are talking about here is society taking freedoms away from individuals. This is not what society allows, the mistakes it lets people make for themselves, but rather, we are debating what society should compel, what it requires people to do. When society is compelling you, it is far more important that there be fewer mistakes. Society lets me drink all the soda I want until I die of diabetes, society does not require me to drink 4 liters of coke everyday, even though it knows that that could give me diabetes.
If we change things a touch, and we have norway’s prison system, that may change my mileage a bit. I’d be more willing to let an innocent be deprived unjustly of their right to liberty, if I knew that otherwise, their rights to dignity and autonomy were respected. In the US, the risks of harm to one’s personal body and health, not to mention dignity, are far too at risk for me to send anyone there if there could be a chance that they were innocent.
Final addition to the hypothetical: I am of the mind that almost the only reason to put people into prison is when they need to be removed from society in order to protect society from them. That if they were not physically isolated, they would commit violent acts against other people. Other, less threatening crimes can be dealt with in an “out-patient” basis. Given that, I could be persuaded to throw the lot of them all in jail, if I knew that there was a very high chance that a large number of them would continue being violent towards members of society. By high chance, we’ll define that I know that if they are released, a total of say 10 or more people will end up being victims in the future.
By the same token, if you knew that the released suspects would be no more likely to commit acts of violence than the general population, would you vote to let them go? It seems as though your main argument has been that you are concerned about what they might do in the future if not isolated from society, so if you were given assurances (the same assurances you got when you found out that 99 were guilty and 1 was innocent), that they would be no more likely to reoffend, would you still like to see them punished for the actions you know they committed, along with punishing the innocent guy?
I said it wouldn’t be a hard decision, not that it wouldn’t be a difficult decision. However, if I don’t know which of the prisoners is not guilty it definitely makes it easier. If I do know (and by extension those in power know) exactly who is not guilty then that makes this a game of some kind that is intentionally torturing someone just to put me on the horns of a moral dilemma, so I’m less keen to play along in that case. As I said, if held at gun point, I still would make the same decision, but, to me at least, it changes things.
Greater good. And don’t project…I don’t think the convicts aren’t human or are monsters or worse. Certainly not all of them. We are, however, talking about murderers, which I consider one of the worst crimes a human can commit on a fellow human.
And, BTW, unless you work at a corrections facility I’ve probably seen a lot more people in jail than you have, seeing as how my department supports detention centers and prisons throughout the state and I’m over at one or another several time a month.
For murderers that certainly is the case, though the OP didn’t mention the possibility of parole. I’d say that in 99 people who have murdered it would be exceptional if a large percentage of them DIDN’T murder again if you set them loose. That was the basis of my own answer, in fact, though from my perspective even one of them murdering an innocent 3rd party would be enough justification.
No, I wouldn’t as I said in my first post in this thread. If we weren’t talking about murder then I’d be more inclined to let the lot of them go. Say we were talking about 100 convicted felons for trafficking marijuana, with one who was definitely not guilty. I’d turn them loose in a heart beat, even knowing that some of them would possibly do harm when released. To me, the crime doesn’t justify the scenario in the OP in this case, and the risk of someone convicted of selling or using MJ is a lot less to the general public than someone convicted of murdering a fellow human.
Since this is something I “get to decide” and not “have to decide”, then I refuse this opportunity I got. Let the courts decide on a case by case basis.
No system ever set up, whether that be criminal justice or otherwise, operates at 100% perfection. It seems that some in this thread feel that because mistakes can be made, we cannot imprison anyone, let alone have a death penalty.
One of the flaws in the American system, IMHO, is that there is no comprehensive appellate review to determine actual guilt or innocence. We have direct appeals to determine trial court error, and collateral review to determine ineffective assistance of counsel or other constitutional error, but there is no review of the merits or whether the sentence was generally appropriate given the crime, the individual’s history, etc
There are plenty of aspects of modern life that function with zero tolerance for failure. Airline safety and neo-natal child care are a couple that spring to mind. It is not difficult to exercise diligence to virtually assure a fail-safe outcome, and an institution like criminal punishment or lifetime incarceration would qualify to be near the top of the list of candidates. It seems that executions are botched more often than not., How hard can it be to kill a captive human under scientifically controlled conditioni
I agree with you, though, that every long-term incarceration ought to be automatically reviewd for forensic validity at peridic intervals.
Although the goal is 100% success it is unachievable. Planes still crash and children in NICU still die. That doesn’t mean that we ban air travel or fire any doctor in a NICU that has a patient die on him/her.
Our justice system, in a general sense and in theory, is set up to minimize innocent people being incarcerated or executed. It is set up so that, in theory, many guilty people will go unpunished so as to further minimize the possibility. But it happens. And in the death penalty threads we hear from opponents that we cannot have the death penalty for this reason. In this thread, it seems that we are hearing that we cannot incarcerate people at all because of the possibility of failure.
I agree that tweaks need to be made, but demanding absolute perfection or else no criminal punishment is not a workable solution.
Missed edit window: A further problem as Bricker noted above, we have no control mechanism to determine a “success” rate. With airline travel, we can have statistics on successful flights. In the NICU, we can see a percentage of patients who survived. In the criminal justice system, we can use our own subjective judgment, filtered through our own biases based upon life experience, and have an opinion on whether we believe the accused to be innocent or guilty. But at the end of the day, we don’t get the answer key. It’s not like God comes down and gives us the correct answer in close cases.
Our justice system has been gamed, so it no longer works “in theory”. As I recall, something like 97% of all criminal cases are plea bargained. If a suspect bets on a jury acquittal and loses, the consequences are crushing. The number of accused who can afford even a modicum of legal counsel is near zero, and an hour would be a reasonable estimate of the amount of time a court-appointed attorney will spend on a case with decades of incarceration in the balance. In fact it has been rigged to maximize the possibility that a mere suspect will go prison without ever having his day in court.
None of which is germane to the premise of this thread, but the general picture of criminal justice ought to be brought into focus, if we wish to use it as a backdrop.
Let the courts decide on a case by case basis.