T_Bone wrote:
The question becomes, "what propotion of innocent people are you willing to have executed to maintain the system"? If the question includes the caveat, "one of them being you", the number is probably quite low, around zero.
Why is it a question of proportions? If someone's not guilty, they shouldn't be convicted regardless of the punishment.
But innocent people ARE convicted. There are people in the UK who have been convicted of murders and then found to be innocent on appeal - not that they shouldn't have been convicted because there was not evidence, but they were found INNOCENT.
A case in point is a man who was convicted of a murder in Bakewell in the 60s - he has a mental age of 12 or something, and the police were found to have got a confession out of him unlawfully. I'm sure that not ALL American police are above malpractice.
The difference being that here, they can be released 30 years later, their life having been ruined, but at least they are still alive to be able to complain about it, eh?
