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Comment by TimPC | Hacker News Reader

This reflects the disparity in the east vs west and the focus on society vs the individual. It's better from an individual rights perspective that an innocent man isn't imprisoned but in societies that put far less weight on individual rights, you wouldn't be willing to have ten guilty men reoffending to prevent that one innocent man being jailed.

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"you wouldn't be willing to have ten guilty men reoffending to prevent that one innocent man being jailed."

You want accuracy. We can just ignore this false dichotomy about letting guilty people go to protect the innocent. If you are jailing the innocent, then you still have guilty parties going free anyways since the wrong person is convicted.

It's not about individual cases, it's about the aggregate effect of the rules governing the process. Making it easier to convict people (by lowering or shifting the burden of proof, weakening procedural protections for the accused etc) will result in more guilty people being convicted, but it will also result in more innocent people being convicted. And making it more difficult to convict has the opposite effect.

It's not like the only two possible outcomes of a criminal investigation are that a guilty person gets convicted or an innocent person gets convicted. You can also convict both (eg, if there is evidence that multiple people were involved), or neither.

What's the aggregate, social effect of living in a state where 9% of prisoners are innocent?

Those same effects can almost always for practical purposes be increasing resources and accountability. If evidentiary rules force you to exclude evidence you obtained illegally learn to break the law less and beat the pavement more.

Loosening rules is in fact likely to result in MORE guilty parties running around not less because it makes it easier to stick SOMEONE with the crime whereas accountability makes it more likely that you stick the right guy with the crime.

I'm mot sure why you're replying this to me. Did you mean to respond to someone else? It seems to be formed argumentatively but follows what I was already saying.

Pretty sure they're just replying specifically to

> you still have guilty parties going free anyways since the wrong person is convicted

which is a non sequitur.

How exactly is that a non sequitur? It should be evident that if you jail the innocent party, the guilty party would still be at large, case closed, authorities would no longer be looking for them.

The whole premise of this one or the other thing is flawed. You can increase conviction of the guilty while also protecting the innocent depending on the procedures taken. The "how" matters at lot. So when you ask people stuff like how many guilty men should go free, it's a complete farce that is easily manipulated based on how you pose the question, methods, and outcomes in the fictional scenario. It takes away focus from the actual policies/solutions.

Edit: why disagree?

Sure but if you are accidentally jailing an innocent person it's quite likely that out of all people you could convict you had the most evidence for convicting that person. I don't think the model that lets more guilty people go free in order to avoid convicting the innocent is somehow able to convict the second or third most likely suspect for this crime when that's the person who's actually guilty.

I don't think it's a false dichotomy. I think roughly speaking you calibrate the standard of evidence for a conviction and a good approximation to how that is calibrated is the ratio of guilty man set free to innocent men jailed. This is calibrating the ratio of false negatives to false positives. To avoid false positives you want fewer convictions which is generally going to result in more false negatives. Yes every time you get a false positive, you also have a guilty person go free, but chances are that person was always going free, since they were never the most likely suspect and were unlikely to ever be tried in court.

I don't know how true this is. My friend moved from the West to Japan and was explaining how policing works there. He said there is more crime in Japan than the statistics show. One part of favoring society over the individual is downplaying crime. He described it like how there is a perception that if no one sees the crime, then the crime did not happen so there is pressure from police not to report crimes and they prefer not to deal it. He said he once dealt with them where they increasingly became hostile towards him and bureaucratic demanding more documentation on his immigration status and banking records to the point where he dropped it. Don't get me wrong, I think Japan is still a low crime country.

I've seen it also, being thrown out of a club by police over a false report by someone else as the police ignored things going on around them. My point is that it's not extremely helpful to society to behave like that.

This doesn't seem likely if your referring to serious crimes. Why would Japanese people somehow care less about reporting something they see right in front of them?

For example, even experts usually assume homicide statistics to be accurate reflections of the ground truth, to within a few percentage points, across all developed countries.

I'm not sure it's just "weight on individual rights". Those ten guilty men reoffending are going to cause damage to other people (assuming it's not something like jaywalking). So for me as a person who just wants to live my life, not subject to being a victim of false arrest, and also not being a crime victim, there's a trade-off. The higher the rate of false positives, the more likely I am to be arrested, tried, jailed, and perhaps even executed for something that I didn't do. But the higher the rate of false negatives, the more likely I am to be robbed, beaten, or killed by someone who was let go rather than jailed.

The "send one innocent to jail" can and will be abused by people in power. The "free 10 guilty" can and will be abused by professional criminals.

You can't make it perfect with imperfect people to implement the system. The best you can do is set the trade-off to minimize the damage to society. Unfortunately, this means some people being damaged each direction - some innocent people jailed, and some people being harmed by guilty people who were let off.

There are also plenty of non-trade-offs, for example.

1) Generally wasting resources locking up innocent people means you have fewer resources to spend locking up the guilty ones.

2) If you have poor investigation that nabs an innocent person as the culprit, you might stop investigating prematurely and not catch the real perpetrator.

3) A culture that locks up innocent people makes every interaction with the cops potentially life-ruining, which will make people less likely to come forward as witnesses, etc.

On the other hand, a culture that doesn't lock up repeat offender guilty people makes every interaction with everyone potentially life-ruining. So even in that area there is a trade-off.

Not necessarily, if comparing against e.g. an approach of jailing the first suspect against whom one finds evidence, the net number of free guilty men may still go up, particularly in crimes where innocent men can be framed.

> This reflects the disparity in the east vs west and the focus on society vs the individual.

More of this 'east vs west' nonsense. The court system exists not for the individual but for the society. This is true in the US, in china, in russia, in europe, everywhere.

> It's better from an individual rights perspective

What individual rights? All rights are given to collectives. Ask the african slaves who got 'special rights' because they belonged to different collectives. Civil rights, women's rights, etc are collective rights.

> but in societies that put far less weight on individual rights,

You mean societies that believe in collateral damage? Where if you think some bad guy is attending a wedding, you kill everyone at the wedding?

If there is a society that values individuals or individual rights, the society wouldn't exist.

Why is it better one way or the other depending on the focus of society? I don't see the connection. I'd equally lose faith in the system either way. Maybe moreso if I see my neighbor going to jail unjustly rather than some random individual.

As for the other way around, seeing a guilty man go free, the standard for imprisoning someone being evidence beyond reasonable doubt seems reasonable.

Granted, there is a two tier justice system and if you are unreasonably wealthy, you have more leeway, but I think that's a different discussion.

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