It's possible for a meat grinder process to still be good at convicting, say, all murderers, at the cost of a few false positives. In a utilitarian sense that

It's possible for a meat grinder process to still be good at convicting, say, all murderers, at the cost of a few false positives. In a utilitarian sense that could be considered reasonable. And it might well be repeatable in a way. Even default-guilty is repeatable, and 'just' on those terms, as long as your pre-charging pipeline isn't kicking up too many false positives. Really it's just about the definition of fairness or justness though. I'm not really disagreeing because I'm not putting forward definitions of my own either, but a lot of the comments here throw out the terms with some assumed meaning. For example, I'm pretty sure if you polled Chinese people, they wouldn't have a problem with the OP story's outcome. So does that make it democratic? Or good as a point of public policy? It's all a bit hand-wavey without specifying. > what's with obsessing over Hong Kong and China if most of the world isn't fair? Well we (I'm assuming) both live in the West and so we encounter the exceptionalist narrative of this place. Certainly HN is a Western forum. Most views of China held by people in the West are based on partial truths and thought-terminating cliches. But that's kind of just how _people_ are the world over, no? Chinese people in Chinese forums have a parallel experience to this, just mirrored.