>At one end of the scale you have Benjamin Franklin's "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxi

>At one end of the scale you have Benjamin Franklin's "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved" and at the other end you have China's ... But you're still arguing at the extremes and evading the central question of whether everyone is treated equally under the law. If the law rules, then everyone will be treated equally under it. Yet we find that in nearly every place on Earth, the law does not rule, because not everyone is treated equally under it. (And I only say "nearly" because I'm not 100% sure that there isn't some society out there that treats everyone equally. I'm 99.99% positive there is not, but I've not been everywhere in this world. But I'm 100% sure we don't have such a system in the US, because I'm an American, and I know America.) All that said, even debating the extremes, I mean, how many times you see some old black guy getting out of prison after 31 years or whatever because he didn't do it? You say, "See! He got out. So there must be Rule of Law!" But that's not how it works, because if there was Rule of Law, it would have been illegal to put him into prison in the first place. It was not. So again, we, ourselves, don't practice the whole "...better 100 guilty persons escape..." maxim. You can say, "Well, there are racial complications." or "Well, there are financial issues that go into legal representation too." or etc etc etc. But that's the same as saying that the law is not paramount.