There are people who believe that convicting the occasional innocent person is inevitable

[xiphias]

In the United States, and probably everywhere else since civilization was invented, there is a constant argument about standards of proof in criminal justice. One of the questions basically boils down to alpha errors versus beta errors -- false positives vs false negatives, or, falsely convicting innocent people, and falsely exonerating guilty people.

Obviously, in ANY system, you want to reduce the number of BOTH kinds of errors, but, in general, when you're setting up a test, the kind of test you do tends to skew one way or another -- you could do manufacturing quality control that lets a few bad things through, but throws out hardly ANY working models, or one that throws out some perfectly fine things, but lets almost NO broken things through. If the things are expensive, and the consequences of failure are low, you might go the first way, and just make sure to have a policy of cheerfully replacing any broken product -- the broken ones you're replacing are ones where they should have been thrown out at the factory anyway, so you're not really out that much money, but throwing out perfectly good ones would cost quite a bit. If the cost of failure is high, though, you'd go the other way -- better to throw out a dozen perfectly good brake pads than have one serious car crash because you let faulty ones through.

Now, there is a school of thought, mostly among conservatives, at least in the United States, that false positives in the criminal justice system are less serious than false negatives -- that is, that it is better to convict innocent people than to free guilty ones. It's not an idea that I agree with -- I think that a justice system needs to be tempered with mercy, and that too high a false conviction rate is a symptom of too little mercy. But I nonetheless appreciate the logic -- if you consider the body politic to be an organism, it's worth killing off some healthy cells in order to make sure that you've killed off the disease. I get that idea.

And, for some people, this idea extends to the death penalty -- having the occasional innocent person executed is a cost that you pay to make sure that you eliminate all the guilty ones.

I don't agree with the logic, obviously, but I understand it. It's a more Draconian view of the world that I'm comfortable with, but, well, it's important to remember that Draco the Lawgiver's system was actually an improvement over what Athens had before.

But, even under that logic -- it's wrong.

See, the idea here is that convicting, and even executing an innocent person is how you make sure that the guilty don't escape.

But convicting an innocent person lets a guilty person free.

That's what I want to point out to, for instance, Rick Perry. If you convict an innocent person, a guilty person goes free. If you let an innocent person be executed, a murderer gets away with murder.

Comments

[fatpie42.livejournal.com]

And, for some people, this idea extends to the death penalty -- having the occasional innocent person executed is a cost that you pay to make sure that you eliminate all the guilty ones.

Sorry, how does that mentality even work? (I'm pretty sure we probably agree on this.) The alternative to the death penalty is not letting them go scott free.

SDT

[happyfunpaul.livejournal.com]

I agree, but the situation is even worse than that. The Rick Perrys of the world think that convictions of any type, including false convictions, are Just Fine-- they don't even see that there's a tradeoff to be made.

In signal detection theory, there's a distinction made between "bias" (which is what you're talking about, "which way to skew") and "sensitivity" (also called "discriminability"), which is, at heart, how good the "test" (here, the justice system) is at distinguishing between "signal" and "noise" in the first place.

In theory, everyone, no matter what their bias, should be in favor of improvements to the justice system that provide better discriminability (assuming they're not too expensive, etc.). After all, discriminability improvements lessen both false negatives and false positives (or, at least, decrease one while leaving the other unchanged). And yet, in reality, many "tough on crime" types oppose such improvements.

For example, DNA testing is a scientific advance that provides a wonderful increase in discriminability, in those cases where physical evidence exists. Use of DNA testing should be pretty much automatic, not only in new cases but to reopen old ones. There's essentially no way you're going to let an already-convicted, actual guilty person go free in these cases, but you might free some innocents. However, many judges have ruled against DNA testing, even though the defense is willing to pay the expense themselves. Even worse, in many (most?) jurisdictions, as a matter of routine, physical evidence destroyed after a trial is concluded.

There are a few "good guy" prosecutors like Craig Watkins of Dallas County, who have actively sought to improve the discriminability of the justice system. However, the vast majority of prosecutors seem to feel that "more convictions = good" and that false positives (convicting innocents) are Just Fine-- i.e., it's not merely that they want to "skew" the bias such that little weight is given to false convictions, it's that they give no weight at ALL to them. They don't even see that there's a tradeoff to be made.

(Every year, for the "Methods" unit test in my psychology class, I ask a variant of the same signal detection question. :-) Maybe one of my students will someday be a better prosecutor.)

[redbird]

It's also worth stating explicitly that there is a difference between "humans are fallible, and we are accepting that if we have any convictions there is a risk that they will include innocent people" and "I don't care that there's proof that this person is innocent, he's already been convicted."

ETA: It may not be unconstitutional to execute an innocent person after due process, but it's still wrong.

[felis-sidus.livejournal.com]

See, the problem is, you're thinking that Perry might actually care whether or not his position makes sense, and that he'd be willing to listen long enough and with enough attention to understand your argument.

This is a governor of Texas. A Republican governor of Texas. A Republican governor of Texas about whom some other Texan Republicans of my acquaintance have said something along the lines of "That guy's frighteningly crazy, even for one of our governors."

To give him what credit I can, Perry's not done anything his predecessors haven't done. Executing innocent people is not a new thing in Texas. You got convicted of something and sentenced to death? The State has jumped through all the hoops that the US Supreme Court makes it jump through? You're dead. It's all been done legally. No problem. Not interested in discussing it or considering other opinions.

Before anyone jumps on me for saying unpleasant things about Texas, let me just explain that I grew up there, and still have close family living there. I have life-long exposure of the way things are done there, and that's the basis of my opinions. Also the reason I no longer live there. Ymmv.

[badmagic.livejournal.com]

When the word got out that Rick Perry might have ordered the execution of an innocent man, his popularity went up. It wasn't that folks thought the guy had done it; they'd heard the news. Perry's ratings went up because they respected his moral stance. Justice, to them, was ensuring that for every crime, there was a punishment. Asking "Wait, have we got the right guy?" only increased the interval between crime & punishment. Get too worried about whether you had found the guilty party and you might not punish anyone at all! To these folks, that would have been unjust.

You're making the very reasonable assumption that people want to punish the guilty. 'Taint so. If someone's been hurt, the first instinct is to lash out. The question "Am I lashing out at the right person?" is often of secondary importance. For the MoH in Vval's story, it hadn't even reached that priority.

[fitfool.livejournal.com]

I'm including this post in a future f-list tour.