Re: the law
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No one should be wrongfully convicted of murder. Addtionally, to rob someone of their future is equal to murder. So anyone who would convict an innocent man is themselves guilty of said crime.
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Nobody is convicting a particular person they know is guilty. The question has to do with the appropriate standard of proof in a murder trial.
You can never be 100% sure that a defendant is guilty. So how sure must you be in order to convict someone? If you vote to convict whenever you are at least 90% sure that he is guilty, you will be letting about 73 guilty people go free for each innocent person you convict (assuming unrealistically that your certainty of guilt over the set of all defendants is evenly distributed between 0% and 100% -- in real life, there is strong evidence against most defendants, so your certainty would be heavily weighted toward the higher end of the spectrum, meaning that maybe only 12 or 13 guilty people would go free for each innocent person who is convicted).
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Thank you very much, this is exactly the point I was getting at.
In criminal courts in the United States, we require a certainty of "beyond a reasonable doubt." Essentially, my questions asks: what is reasonable, exactly?
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