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I've always been confused by this proposition; If there is an innocent person convicted of a crime, then there also has to be a guilty person that has gone fre

by cortic 10y ago

I've always been confused by this proposition; If there is an innocent person convicted of a crime, then there also has to be a guilty person that has gone free.. so it seems the ultimatum has to be "are we are willing to let a guilty person go free rather than let a guilty person go free and an innocent person go to jail." Which has a much more obvious answer..

iopq 10y ago
Let's say you have 200,000 suspected criminals, some % of which are criminals. How many of them are you willing to put in prison? If it's looking that most likely around 30% are guilty, do you put 60,000 in prison and say "oh well, some false negatives, some false positives, whatever" or do you just put 30,000 in prison to prevent most innocent persons from going to jail? Then you are letting half of the guilty people go free It's a question of how many innocent people you are willing to jail to catch more real criminals
- cortic 10y ago
  I see what you are getting at, but it would still be; 60,000 = "oh well, some false negatives, some false negatives AND false positives, whatever" 30,000 = "oh well, some false negatives" Although i get the feeling we are moving into semantics, its just always bothered me the way this was worded. Anyway thanks for that perspective, made me think.
- angry_octet 10y ago
  Or to give it an engineering flavor, the ROC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris... It seems we accept a higher FAR (False Alarm Rate, a diagnostic which gives a false positive) for certain communities (poor people, minorities) than others. The consequence matters too: even people who support the retributive aspect of the death penalty may reject it in practice because of the excessive false conviction rate.
morgante 10y ago
That's assuming a hypothetical crime actually happened in the first place. In many cases it's possible that no crime ever happened. (For example, if the man in the article never actually had child porn that doesn't mean someone else did.)
- cortic 10y ago
  Yes you are right, this is the exception. Although, thinking about it from the point of view of someone being Convicted of a crime that never happened is fair enough, But when someone is not convicted of a crime that never happened we are not 'letting a guilty person go free' so both options in the ultimatum are broken with this.

by cortic 10y ago

iopq 10y ago

Let's say you have 200,000 suspected criminals, some % of which are criminals. How many of them are you willing to put in prison? If it's looking that most likely around 30% are guilty, do you put 60,000 in prison and say "oh well, some false negatives, some false positives, whatever" or do you just put 30,000 in prison to prevent most innocent persons from going to jail? Then you are letting half of the guilty people go free It's a question of how many innocent people you are willing to jail to catch more real criminals

cortic 10y ago
I see what you are getting at, but it would still be; 60,000 = "oh well, some false negatives, some false negatives AND false positives, whatever" 30,000 = "oh well, some false negatives" Although i get the feeling we are moving into semantics, its just always bothered me the way this was worded. Anyway thanks for that perspective, made me think.
angry_octet 10y ago
Or to give it an engineering flavor, the ROC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris... It seems we accept a higher FAR (False Alarm Rate, a diagnostic which gives a false positive) for certain communities (poor people, minorities) than others. The consequence matters too: even people who support the retributive aspect of the death penalty may reject it in practice because of the excessive false conviction rate.

morgante 10y ago

That's assuming a hypothetical crime actually happened in the first place. In many cases it's possible that no crime ever happened. (For example, if the man in the article never actually had child porn that doesn't mean someone else did.)

cortic 10y ago
Yes you are right, this is the exception. Although, thinking about it from the point of view of someone being Convicted of a crime that never happened is fair enough, But when someone is not convicted of a crime that never happened we are not 'letting a guilty person go free' so both options in the ultimatum are broken with this.