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Your point seems true in a universal context, but false in many limited or special contexts, like this one. Making all prosecutors more likely to bring charges
by wcarss 9y ago
Your point seems true in a universal context, but false in many limited or special contexts, like this one.
Making all prosecutors more likely to bring charges in cases they think they will lose sounds like a bad idea. The easy scary example is of prosecutors frequently bringing simple theft charges against people who just happened to be nearby a theft. It's obviously bad: huge numbers of potentially powerless, innocent people are exposed to extreme damage to their character, which they cannot fix and which may destroy their lives and health. The false positive dominates the situation, and its harm to society is clear.
In the specific case of top-level bank executives manipulating things like LIBOR, I think the balance just as clearly tips the other way. Consider the rarity of the crime, the impact of the crime, the size of the impacted group who may have charges brought against them (right or wrong), and the power of members of that group within society.
I posit that the crime is exceedingly rare (we're discussing a probable instance from over a decade ago), the impact of the crime is exceedingly high (by harming the entire financial apparatus of society, it can meaningfully cause real harm to millions, if not billions of people), the size of the group is exceedingly small (you could legibly write all of the potentially impacted people's names over decades on a small stack of A4 paper), and the power within society of members of the group is uniformly among the highest possible level in our society (they are by definition some of the richest and most well connected into the political, financial, and legal systems of the world).
Balance toward the false negative here implies that members of this class of potential perpetrator could feel more they are likely to get away with this specific crime. Balance toward the false positive implies that, when this massive crime is believed to have been committed, these few, powerful members are open to, let's say high chance of wrongful arrest, that they have the overwhelming ability to remedy the effects of via legal means after the fact.
The potential for meaningful harm to society seems to be decidedly on the side of allowing false negatives. In this specific, unbelievably narrow context, I am all for shifting the balance toward more prosecutions. I think that this is in line with the argument being put forward originally by the parent.