It's a weird trope on HN here that you see daft "I had a thought about this today" blog posts hit the front page. In these article, someone discusses a few othe

It's a weird trope on HN here that you see daft "I had a thought about this today" blog posts hit the front page. In these article, someone discusses a few other blog posts and some late night discussions over beers and discovers a glaring error in Human Thinking: "in all these discussions pitting innocent convicts against guilty criminals who go free, one factor rarely ever comes up" If only someone would create a couple of fields entirely devoted to the study of this sort of thing, and do quantitative research. They could call these fields "criminology" and "penology", and perhaps write research papers attempting to analyze the rates these events happen. Sarcasm aside, I find it highly unlikely that the additional protection against judicial and police errors that the whole ("better 10 guilty men..") stuff is about factors remotely into the prospect of your average kidnapper, rapist, murderer or bank robber. If they figure they are going to get away with it I would imagine that they are picturing "not getting arrested at all", not "being freed on a technicality because Dirty Harry didn't Miranda-ize them". Also, a world where we don't have this particular trope is a world where police and prosecutors get sloppier and sloppier. In this world, a lot of other people are also murdered/raped/kidnapped/whatever because when we find a convenient patsy for a crime and put them away, the actual criminal walks free.