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Comment by RHSeeger | Hacker News Reader

Searching for your exact question indicates it does happen.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/27233798/ns/us_news-crime_and_cour...

> Commission President Anthony Pacheco said Friday that he was highly concerned after learning police have arrested at least two innocent people because of faulty fingerprint analysis.

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And how many innocent people were convicted based on false positives?

How many guilty people were convicted based on true positives?

These are not comparable. The first must be zero, and the second should be "as many as possible while keeping the first at zero."

It must be zero? What if that resulted in 50% of murderers getting away?

Then the justice system is relying on faulty technology.

The justice system relies on human memory all the time. That’s the most unreliable thing we currently use.

What happened to "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." As expressed by the English jurist William Blackstone in his seminal work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in the 1760s.

Seems you're willing to punish an innocent man and a guilty man just to make sure a committed crime is followed up with a conviction.

Why have such a low bar in 2019?

Innocent people are killed by the same murderers in both scenarios. In yours, they are also sometimes killed or imprisoned by the state and are therefore at more total risk.

Trying to eliminate false positives at the expense of letting criminals go free is a staple of western criminal law dating back to 1760s. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

Convicted isn't the right metric. Accusing someone of some crimes (generally anything sexually related or child related) is enough to ruin their life.

2 out of how many? Is that 2% or .0000001%

Given that all I had to do was search on the phrase used by the poster, and there were results on the first page... I'd say the total number isn't 2.

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