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You realize how _high_ that ratio is if taken literally: almost 10% of people found guilty will be innocent.

In practice, the west probably does more like 1% or 0.1%; El Salvador has released ~6% of those arrested. Though that figure also includes plea deals, and cases where people argued for clemency. And they're probably incorrectly releasing people who are in fact gang members too.

These kinds of numbers are easily justified when you take into account the fact that criminals repeatedly commit crimes. In the case of El Salvador, literally hundreds of lives per year are being saved, and an entire country is being transformed for the better.

Jameson Lopp 8mo ago

That's not what the ratio implies. It's basically the ethics behind the concept of requiring a prosecutor prove their charges "beyond a reasonable doubt" even though such a high bar means that more guilty people will be found not guilty.

The goal being to convict as few innocent people as possible, rather than to convict as many guilty people as possible.

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Peter Todd 8mo ago

No, that's not the goal. If the goal was to convict as few innocent people as possible you wouldn't convict anyone at all.

The actual goal is a tradeoff between harm to the innocent due to criminals, and harm to the innocent due to the courts.

A particularly stark example of this is war: the harm to innocents is enormous, so standards of due process become very low. I'm in Kyiv at the moment, and I'm very glad that the Ukrainian military isn't waiting for court cases to finish before bombing Russians. If they did, it simply wouldn't be possible for me to (relatively) safely be here.