Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cmurf 3216 days ago
The logic of innocent until proven guilty philosophy, is that it's better for a guilty person to go free than for an innocent person to be jailed. Hence the burden on proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Probability isn't sufficient, in this philosophy, because it's a trap. Of course probably he has on these drives what prosecutors claim, or worse, evidence of his direct involvement. And the trap is the injection of lack of sympathy into the decision making process; of course any reasonable person will say, eww he's almost certainly a creep therefore I'm not sympathetic to his indefinite incarceration. But that's exactly what the philosophy was supposedly designed to avoid, any possibility that innocent people get jailed; not preventing guilty people going free.

This is why you see a lot of effort by prosecutors defending against introduction of new evidence to prove innocence; because proving innocence well after a guilty verdict, itself shows the possibility of jailing innocents. It taints the system. And then you get these ever more perverse notions that executing those who later prove themselves innocent is not an unconstitutional execution when that person had received a free and fair trial finding them guilty of a capital crime. http://www.businessinsider.com/antonin-scalia-says-executing...