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Why do your PD friends care so much about protecting the rights of their "clearly guilty" clients? It's because protecting the guilty's rights ensures the inno
by agwa 14y ago
Why do your PD friends care so much about protecting the rights of their "clearly guilty" clients? It's because protecting the guilty's rights ensures the innocent's rights are protected too.
The trope here is the suggestion that criminals are getting off on technicalities. As you've illustrated with Miranda, even with the improperly-obtained evidence suppressed, he was still convicted. The government doesn't need to violate people's rights to keep criminals off the streets. And perhaps there would be fewer of those pesky appeals if the state did things right the first time.
Of course most 4th amendment decisions concern guilty people - the remedy for 4th amendment violations is suppression, so you never hear about the innocent people who are harassed by police with illegal searches - no evidence is found so there's no case with evidence to suppress! (Civil action is an uphill battle even for those who are able to bring it.)
- rayiner 14y ago> Why do your PD friends care so much about protecting the rights of their "clearly guilty" clients? It's because protecting the guilty's rights ensures the innocent's rights are protected too. It's not a matter of protecting the rights of guilty people or not, but determining how much to protect them. Every procedural protection has a cost. If a procedural protection might be invoked by a person who has a 10% chance of being innocent, then maybe it's worth the cost. If it's more likely to be invoked by a person who has a 1% chance of being innocent, then maybe it's not. Looking only at media reports gives you a distorted picture of what those probabilities are. > The trope here is the suggestion that criminals are getting off on technicalities. I didn't say they were getting off on technicalities. I said they were trying to get off on technicalities. "Better to let a 100 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man go to jail" makes for good rhetoric, but even such flowery language implies a point at which its better to let 1 innocent man go to jail than let a certain number of guilty men go free.
- serans 14y agoI guess the problem is there's no such a thing as a person having "a 10% chance of being innocent" Either he is or he is not. He might have certain probability of being declared guilty (which is entirely different), but I don't think there's a way to estimate that. BTW 99% is a very low accuracy. If we accepted that for aircraft, 13 would crash weekly.