Quote:
Originally Posted by Oling_Roachinen
I'm not comfortable sentencing an innocent person to a year in prison though.
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We do that regularly in the current system. If you aren't comfortable with the conviction of innocent people then outside of a few case which don't rely on circumstantial evidence how can you be comfortable with the Justice system.
The end result of our current system is that innocent people serve time. If we as a society aren't comfortable with the trade off between the wrongful conviction rate of x% and protecting our society from the guilty than the justice system is a failure.
And this is the crux of my point. Whether a punishment is cruel or unusual needs to consider that an innocent person will serve it and does the societal benefit of the guilty serving this punishment outweigh the harm of the innocent person.