Is it better that ten guilty persons go free than that one innocent person be convicted?

Abstract

I Introduction The relevance of answers depends, of course, on getting questions right. Sometimes, however, we are not quite sure we actually know what question is. The doctrine underlies title question to this essay is commonly ascribed to William Blackstone. in Commentaries on Laws of England (1769), Blackstone wrote the law holds is better ten guilty persons escape, than one innocent suffer. (1) This formulation is not only version of doctrine. For example, in his book on Evidence (1824), another British scholar, Thomas Starkie, insisted that is better ninety-nine ... offenders shall escape than one innocent man be condemned. (2) The various versions of this idea in circulation inspired Jeremy Bentham to make following skeptical comment in A Treatise on Judicial Evidence (1825): At first was said to be better to save several guilty men, than to condemn a single innocent man; others, to make maxim more striking, fixed on number ten, a third made this ten a hundred, and a fourth made a thousand. All these candidates for prize of humanity have been outstripped by I know not how many writers, who hold, that, in no case, ought an accused to be condemned, unless evidence amount to mathematical or absolute certainty. According to this maxim, nobody ought to be punished, lest an innocent man be punished. (3) II A Doctrine and Its Interpretation I shall take for granted no reasonable person could possibly endorse version implicitly ridiculed by Bentham: It is better all guilty persons go free than one innocent person be convicted. Nevertheless, in light of Bentham's remarks, seems equally clear would be futile to embark on an exercise in moral mathematics in order to fix and justify correct ratio of false acquittals of guilty to false convictions of I shall presuppose, moreover, any ratio one might come up with, say forty-two to one, (4) should not be taken to indicate is forty-two times worse to convict an innocent person than to acquit a guilty one. Rather, I think a more adequate interpretation of doctrine is to be found in a U.S. Supreme Court case from 1895, Coffin v. U.S. In this case, Justice White, who delivered opinion of court, dated doctrine back to Roman law. He quoted a Roman official who wrote it was better to let crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn innocent. (5) I take this doctrine, which I shall call Roman doctrine, to articulate strong intuition of everyday morality: is worse to convict innocent people than to acquit guilty people. Significantly, to argue some phenomena are morally better than some other phenomena is to presuppose they are comparable with respect to some common moral standard of comparison, for example, a particular conception of criminal justice. There is no further need to presuppose a single scale of units of value allowing for quantification or measurement of how much better is to reduce number of false convictions rather than to reduce number of false acquittals. Most people take for granted Roman doctrine is basically sound, yet does not follow is easy to articulate a rationale for it. Still, in a certain narrow interpretation, seems as if doctrine is trivially true. Consider two comparable cases of murder, both of which are wrongly decided. In one case a murderer is acquitted, in another case an innocent person is convicted of murder. According to doctrine, outcome in former case is better, or rather, less worse or less bad, than outcome of latter case. How could fail to be true, we might ask. After all, by punishing innocent, guilty person is still out there enjoying his freedom. In TV series The Fugitive, when Dr. Kimble was wrongly convicted for murder of his wife, he was only person who kept looking for one-armed man. …