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Honestly it seems absurd that innocent people can actually end up being robbed of their life and thrown in prison at all.
by brailsafe 4y ago
Honestly it seems absurd that innocent people can actually end up being robbed of their life and thrown in prison at all.
- eru 4y agoIn aggregate, it's all a question of numbers. Alas. If you want 0% chance for innocent people to get convicted, you have to let many guilty people go.
- andrewflnr 4y agoIf you want literally 0% innocent people punished, you have to let all guilty people go, i.e. don't attempt justice.
- eru 4y agoWell, we only have about 8 billion people on the planet. If you can drive down the rate of innocent people punished below, say, 1 in a trillion, that's probably close enough to zero in practice?
- andrewflnr 4y agoBut we won't get there, not even close, maybe not even in a panopticon dystopia. Anyway, your baseline should be total accusations (not prosecutions, you're already a fair bit into the pipeline at that point and imposing significant costs), which is significantly higher than total people.
- GavinMcG 4y agoDoes it seem more absurd than the fact that innocent people can be killed by drunk drivers? Or that they can be dismembered in industrial accidents? It seems like you have an expectation that human systems could be perfect, and I’m curious where that comes from or what sustains it.
- brailsafe 4y agoThere's plenty to criticize urban development systems that make people getting killed by drunk drivers more likely, but there's no aspect of intentionality in chance accidents. If we build a system that's supposed to dole out punishment, it should at least be able to prevent that happening, or at least re-evaluate every so often to ensure all previous and active decisions still make sense or whether someone deserves a lot of compensation.