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Comment by deepdriver | Hacker News Reader

>It is better than 10 guilty persons escape than 1 innocent suffers

What if the escaped guilty persons cause more than one innocent to suffer? Seems like an obvious flaw in this aphorism. Maybe works for petty thievery, not so much crimes of great bodily harm.

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> What if the escaped guilty persons cause more than one innocent to suffer? Seems like an obvious flaw in this aphorism.

It's a principle of justice that was arrived at through a lot of thought and experience. It of course takes into account that the guilty people that slip away due to this principle will cause harm of their own.

But a justice system without this principle, one that does not place a high bar for what makes one guilty, one that isn't very careful about labeling innocents guilty, will cause far more suffering. It makes systematic abuses of power more likely, and affects far more innocents ultimately. This only becomes more and more true as the power and reach of the state gets higher and higher compared to that of an individual who might be a potential criminal.

On the other hand, systems where the bar for guilt is too high err too much towards not punishing criminals. Eventually such systems are rejected by their subjects and collapse, either totally or into anarcho-tyranny. This is especially true of states with great power over the middle classes, but little power or willingness to exercise it over the worst criminal element. There's a balance to be found in the middle between standards of guilt that are too high or too low.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_T._Francis#Thought_and_...

>Francis's term "anarcho-tyranny" refers to armed dictatorship without rule of law, or a Hegelian synthesis when the state tyrannically or oppressively regulates citizens' lives yet is unable or unwilling to enforce fundamental protective law.

> Eventually such systems are rejected by their subjects and collapse, either totally or into anarcho-tyranny.

Are there any actual examples of this happening? The link doesn't cite any.

Anarchy-tyranny in 1980s New York (see “Context and Background”) led to this famous act of vigilantism and subsequent acquittal via what was essentially jury nullification:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_New_York_City_Subway_shoo...

Recalling a DA is firm rejection of his vision for a more-permissive justice system:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chesa-boudin-san-francisco-da-r...

In terms of total collapse, see Venezuela (“Public Opinion” subsection highlights ineffective courts and weak rulings):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Venezuela

Pretty thin evidence to jump on a white supremacist’s pet theory.

The state of law and order in Venezuela is thin evidence? How many countries’ justice systems would need to collapse to convince you of this concept’s validity?

The “anarcho-tyranny” idea is orthogonal to Francis’s other and later views, and has become a mainstay topic in mainstream conservatism. Here it used in a Newsweek article by Hispanic conservative writer Pedro Gonzalez:

https://www.newsweek.com/president-bidens-anarcho-tyranny-op...

> The state of law and order in Venezuela is thin evidence?

It’s evidence of something, but not a too-high bar of criminal conviction.

> has become a mainstay topic in mainstream conservatism

This says bad things about modern mainstream conservatism, not good things about Francis.

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