The trial is designed to protect the rights of a defendant: as the English jurist William Blackstone famously said, it is “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” In othe...The trial is designed to protect the rights of a defendant: as the English jurist William Blackstone famously said, it is “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” In other words, a criminal trial doesn’t treat the two types of error in the same way~… punishing the innocent is deemed to be much worse than letting the guilty go free.
The trial is designed to protect the rights of a defendant: as the English jurist William Blackstone famously said, it is “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” In othe...The trial is designed to protect the rights of a defendant: as the English jurist William Blackstone famously said, it is “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” In other words, a criminal trial doesn’t treat the two types of error in the same way: punishing the innocent is deemed to be much worse than letting the guilty go free.