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I feel like this validates my comment? The two notions regarding criminal law you post are not maddening, but thoroughly reassuring.

• wpietri 13y ago
  They are reassuring from a systemic design perspective, or from the perspective of someone who is accused but innocent. But in the individual case of an obviously guilty person going free, it is legitimately maddening.
  • crucini 13y ago
    I think with more perspective, there is nothing maddening about it. It's like a pool filter. Any one particle of feces can float around the pool forever, but in aggregate the feces level is reduced.
    • wpietri 13y ago
      I think that's a valid perspective, but that's not the only one. If you have been a victim of a crime and the perp walks, it's reasonable to say something besides, "Thanks goodness our system works to protect the innocent!" I also think prosecutors should always be a little maddened by it. It's they're job to keep the guilty-but-free error as low as possible. Or to put it differently, aggregate feces reduction is great, but you are unlikely to say that if you discover a bit of somebody's poop in your mouth. And you never want the person in charge of cleaning the pool to say, "Fuck it, a little poop never killed anybody."