Law Thread

Lets analyze the validity of Blackstone's Formulation.

>"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"

There is strong support for this in the legal community and there seems to be a religious basis for this...

>Abraham drew near, and said, "Will you consume the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous within the city? Will you consume and not spare the place for the fifty righteous who are in it?[3] ... What if ten are found there?" He [The Lord] said, "I will not destroy it for the ten's sake."

This is from the part of the bible about the destruction of Sodom

However there have been several notable critics including Otto von Bismarck who actually formulated the inverse saying...

>"it is better that ten innocent men suffer than one guilty man escape."

Other notable critics include Pol Pot and Dick Chaney who was fine with torturing Gitmo inmates who were approximately 25% innocent and said he would do it again.

So...

Is the formulation legitimate and if so on what basis, if not on what basis?

Is there an actual ratio such as 1:10 or 1:1000 or is it simply an expression of the spirit of the law. E.g. we should seek to protect the accused from speculation and circumstantial evidence among other legal pitfalls.

Finally, for whom is it better. Phrased another way, does society benefit more from the protection of the innocent or from protection from the guilty?

Wikipedia Article
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone's_formulation

>Dick Chaney
lol

it's not about math. it is, first, about the cruelty of an innocent man being punished unjustly.

second, it's about how a defendant is viewed under the eyes of the law. if the bias is in favor of the defendant (innocent until proven guilty, similar to guilty men going free) it takes power away from the state. if the opposite is true, you're merely hoping that the man is guilty (which is the implication from jailing innocent men), it makes it easier to put people like civil dissidents in jail because you're basically 'connecting the suspicion dots' instead of providing irrefutable evidence. the reason for this is an American hatred of kangaroo courts installed in england at the time.

third, an important factor of the law is reciprocity. your punishment should be equal to your crime, because this satisfies human/primate conceptions of fairness. I hope that you can see the difference between:

>10 innocent men and 1 guilty man in prison
>10 guilty men and 1 innocent man in prison

which is to say that a denial of Blackstone boils down to innocent people paying for the crimes of a minority, rather than a minority benefiting from the good of a majority. if you're going to be assumed guilty, I personally believe that that inspires crime and inspires an authoritarian government.

this is similar to a sentiment of Franklin, something about the government not trusting citizens with guns. your government must display faith in its citizens for its citizens to respect it.

bumping because Veeky Forums needs more law threads

any JDs browsing Veeky Forums rn?

>"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"
I agree with this the most.

Anyway, since this is a law thread, what do you think of capital punishment?

Convention on the rights of the child, and why the USA is the only country that didn't ratify it?

I'm a lawyer and I think these threads are retarded. No one who knows anything about law would want to "discuss" with morons who don't know the first thing.

The entire point of Veeky Forums is uneducated people arguing about the subject matter better left to professionals.

Law student here. They don't discuss legal moral philosophy in law school outside of the barest mention of morality on the first day of class. They just teach us "the science of the law" in the Harvard Model.

>ten guilty persons escape
>they make hundreds of innocent suffer

checkmate anglo cucks

>I'm a lawyer and instead of contributing and explaining I......

S H I T P O S T E

That seems pretty wack. For me, legal theory is why I am interested in law and why I hope to one day go to law school to become a public defender. I think the why of the law is pretty important but they really just dont teach it?

The whole point of the system is to make justice. If you arrest an innocent person, all is for naught. You ruined a good man's reputation AND you're allowing the true criminal to run free and make innocents suffer.
It's shameful that as a law student, I neglected a lot of the philosophy, so I don't know a whole lot other than Ancient Greece and medieval ethics.

Law school is pretty Wack indeed

Hmm, so when it comes to morality should I trust Abraham and Benjamin Franklin or Pol Pot and Dick Cheney?

really makes you think

I don't think you understand how the legal system works. If you are judged to be guilty after proper application of the Law, then you are guilty until (and if) that judgement is later overturned.

I read the OP and thought, well that's an imponderable, but you demonstrated that Blackstone's formula is both rational and reasonable. Well done.

>I think the why of the law is pretty important but they really just dont teach it?

If you're interested in that, you could make a point of studying it in your third year (assuming you're going to a US law school), when you have more flexibility in selecting your coursework.

Why did god not develop fighter drones with surgical precision? Why do his miracles need to be nukes?

>acquit guilty man
>guilty man gets away

>convict innocent man
>innocent man suffers AND guilty man gets away

inb4 victimless crimes

Which system is better: civil law or common law?

That's not necessarily true. In the second scenario, you're presumably casting a net so wide that you catch all actual perpetrators, but at a cost of an order of magnitude more innocent lives being ruined.

Obviously, that's assuming it works. I still don't agree with it on principle.
>Let's listen to Pol Pot's theory of legal morality

what are you basing your question on? efficirncy? practicality? realism? ethics?

ideologicaly the notion of the formulation comes from the idea of individual rights, as in citisen rights etc, a right to fair trial etc...

the second one also comes from a ideological standpoint, just a more militaristic one, concerned with efficiency and erradicating mistakes and disfunctions with detterents and 'making sure'

theres no right or wrong about it, its two different approaches for two different reasons, representing two different systems, both of which seem to work just fine