Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/02/01
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Alan Hull goosestepped: > Synchronicity? I've been reading many challenges lately to the > jurist's contention that it is "better to let ten guilty persons escape > than one innocent suffer". > > How many innocent people are certain to suffer at the hands of the ten > freed guilty? Is it really 10:1? Are we talking about *violent* crimes, or ven about crimes with actual victims?? Is it acceptable that the government (putatively of, by, for the People) should be the entity doing the harm? And by far most importantly, will there be bias in just who gets falsely accused? Will false accusations differentially fall upon the poor, upon people wose skin is a different color than those controlling the government & police? Will false accusations be used for political ends? Sadly, the answers to the last set of questions uniformly seem to be "yes". Compare the mandatory minimum sentences for posession of "crack" cocaine to those for posession of powder cocaine - *exactly* the same chemical substance. Oh, yeah. poor and black folks are disproportionately charged with crack posession, rich and white folks are disporportionately charged with powder cocaine posession. Who's likely to pay the higher price if falsely accused? It ain't gonna be the white yuppie. Hell, he'll probably get good enough legal representation to get off. The poor guy trying to feed his family is going to be told by the public defender to cop a plea bargain, guilty or no. Bluntly: with the nearly 10-fold increase in the US prison population over the last 3 decades, are we now 10-fold safer? Arguments that we should sacrifice individual civil rights in favor of expedient prosecution are generally used by those who favor the police state, i.e. those who are least likely to ever actually *need* their civil rights defended. - -Alexey Merz