Man, every time a prosecutor gets a case overturned, they themselves need to be put on trial. Was was their motive? Did they ignore evidence? Dig deep into why they tried so hard to get an innocent person behind bars.
[1]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wrongful-conviction/id...
(This is distinct from the problem of qualified immunity for the police, who (1) regularly kill people under dubious at best circumstances, and (2) regularly launder falsified or coerced evidence into the legal system. It makes sense, in my opinion, to introduce personal liability there.)
I’m curious what your “Blackstone number” is. The Blackstone principle is that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent one to be imprisoned. It seems you might go higher than ten—but how high? Should we be so concerned about wrongful convictions that we allow 1000 guilty men to go free for each one? 10,000?
Then, turn that around. Given how often prosecutors have good motives and adequate grounds for moving forward with a conviction, how many innocent prosecutors would you put through the wringer just to catch one guilty one?
It seems like you have an expectation that human systems could be perfect, and I’m curious where that comes from or what sustains it.
If you want 0% chance for innocent people to get convicted, you have to let many guilty people go.
If you can drive down the rate of innocent people punished below, say, 1 in a trillion, that's probably close enough to zero in practice?
The problem is that we are not achieving the blackstone number more than 1/10th of people in prison are innocent.
That means the criminals responsible for those crimes are still out there
> That means the criminals responsible for those crimes are still out there
That's more than a little concerning. Link?
This is incoherent; it is obvious that you'd want to set this differently for different crimes.
We can also ask for certainty that people who are guilty in fact get convicted. ("It's bad when guilty men go free.") This is the opposite of the other kind of certainty. Here, we'd want a lot of that type of certainty for crimes with severe punishments (we assume that such crimes are very serious), and we don't really care about this for crimes with no particular impact on victims. So we want more certainty-of-conviction in case 1 and less certainty-of-conviction in case 2.
Certainty-of-conviction and certainty-of-guilt are, in the general case, directly in conflict with each other. We don't want either (in a relative sense) for trivial crimes, so it doesn't really matter what happens. We want lots of both for serious crimes, so what happens matters, but we can't actually achieve both goals.
In conclusion, when setting your policy, you need to look at other aspects of the crime than the one(s) you mention here, which are not informative as to this question. (Though they are informative as to the question you literally asked; we want more certainty of every type on serious crimes.) Perhaps the punishment for a particular crime is out of proportion to how serious that crime is. If the punishment is too heavy, we'd want more certainty-of-guilt; if it's too light, we'd want more certainty-of-conviction. Perhaps it's much easier than usual to reliably determine guilt-in-fact for a particular crime. Then we'd want more certainty-of-conviction.
There is nonsuch thing. Even short conviction destroys people's ability to hold jobs, find housing and to find partners. People inyour life stop trusting you and that is super big one too. And it may cause divorce with law abiding lartner and factor into custody dispute.
Any Criminal conviction has huge ramifications.
The relevance of a Blackstone number is it basically sets all this aside and looks at an ideal circumstance, and you can adjust from there, if you want to take peculiarites into account.
Of course they should have tried to correct the mistake once pointed out, but the justice seems doesn't seem to like doing that.
Putting prosecutors on trial for something less than clear prosecutorial over-reach is, in my view, a major mistake. Perhaps the bar should be lower than it is, but there's no way it should be as low as "didn't get a conviction" or "overturned on appeal".
(And I see the strain between this comment and my previous one. If the prosecutor has discretion, then they have responsibility for how they use it. But the bar for coming after the prosecutor needs to be considerably higher than just a "not guilty" verdict. The prosecutor probably should be more responsible for abusing their discretion than they are. But when the pendulum moves, it often moves too far.)
A job which also includes prosecutorial discretion.
IOW, it's also literally their job to decide which cases to pursue and which to drop.