Bryan Derksen wrote:
> On 2 Jun 2002 10:52:07 -0700, schillin at spock.usc.edu (John Schilling)
> wrote:
> >stremler at rohan.sdsu.edu writes:
> >>I hear stories like this and I just wonder what people are thinking when
> >>they admit to heinous crimes that they (allegedly) didn't do.
> >
> >"If I tell the mean policeman what he wants to hear, he will let me go
> >to the bathroom and then take a nap."
>> And then there's always the completely rational approach; "If you
> confess, you'll get 20 years. If we convict you, you get the chair."
>> I know that the justice system is not infallable, and that many people
> get convicted who are actually innocent. I can get a lot of books read
> in 20 years, and then after that they'll let me go. If it looks like
> they've got enough evidence and witnesses lined up, or I'm the wrong
> ethnicity or whatever, then it might be a safer bet to make even if I
> didn't really do it.
US District Court Judge Richard Posner wrote something like:
Anything we do to increase the numbere of guilty
we convict will increase the number of innocent we convict.
Anything we do to increase the number of innocent we acquit
will increase the number of guilty we acquit.
Posner, Richard
Problems of Jurisprudence,
Harvard Press, 1993
JKA
--
Reality? I have no need of that hypothesis.
