It does seem a little odd, to me. If somebody tries to bomb a place, and the government screwed up the chain of custody on the evidence, of course they shouldn’t be imprisoned (see cases like Mapp V. Ohio). In addition, they have a right to a trial by a jury of their peers. Throwing someone in jail for years is the most severe of civil rights violations if unwarranted, justifying a very high standard of evidence.
Perhaps the evidence our suspect bombed a plane wasn’t quite strong enough for “beyond reasonable doubt”, but they did lose a civil case from the victim’s families under “preponderance of evidence”. Whence cometh the opinion that “beyond a reasonable doubt” must be the standard of evidence before someone is searched before boarding a plane?
When attempting to board an airplane, where different levels of physical screening take different amounts of time and resources to perform, and it’s not practical to fully screen everyone, we ought to apply the same legal standards of a criminal conviction to differentiate different levels of screening? Even if there’s “clear and convincing” evidence the person bombed a plane before, we ought to let them through anyway without even patting them down? Do we need a jury of peers at the ready at every checkpoint to make this determination? Would you also apply this same standard before someone could be restricted from admittance to the halls of congress, to Fort Knox, or to a warehouse in a major city storing many tons of seized fertilizer?
For reference, here’s a full list of the standards of evidence in the US, ordered from weakest to strongest:
1. Some evidence
2. Reasonable indications
3. Reasonable suspicion
4. Reasonable to believe
5. Probable cause
6. Some credible evidence
7. Preponderance of the evidence
8. Clear and convincing evidence
9. Beyond reasonable doubt
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(law)