h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hey all - heres a question that i've asked to different people with many different answers.
If you have a group of people accused of commiting a crime and one of them is innocent and the rest are guilty how many people would there have to be before you agreed to take them all down rather then let the guilty walk free.
For these purposes i will set the guilty people as haveing comitted a single pre-planned murder.
The answers i've had give me the starting boundaries of 10 guilty to an infinite amount.
I personally think around 150 people.
What do you think?

So in our prison population we should tolerate one in a hundred and fifty incarcerated people being innocent?

Seems a pretty high proportion to me.... The uk has prison population of about 90,000 right? So that would be 600 odd innocent men and women in prison?

Hmmmm....

FB

I would suspect that there are a couple of hundred inooccent people in ouir prisons tho probs not as many as 600 - 200? so 1 in 450?

execute them all

the method of execution being 'harvesting'

you can get a good 26ish transplants out of 1 good body

so the the improvement of 26 lives for the death of 1 innocent isn't so bad

Why stop at just the guilty?

Why not genetically test people, and those judged "inferior" could be harvested to help those with more "pure" blood eh?

FB

(Apologies if I missed an implied )

We're all guilty, they just haven't passed the appropriate laws yet.

crimes are committed by the living,

the crime is life, the sentance is death

zero crime, zero re-offending a perfect system

À perfectly crap system that wouldn't work
I'd sooner see any number of guilty people go free than a single innocent person go to prison. Prison doesn't seem to even be much about punishment or reeducation anymore, just apeasing those in the public who get all hot and flustered about such things So many crimes go unsolved, that a few more guilty people not ending up in prison wouldn't necessarily make that much differnce anyhow .

Whiole i have to agree with the last message i was starting to panic about what had happened to my poor little innoocent question

I think 26 is overely low, though not as low as some people have said to me the 90000 figure given would mean 3500 innoocent people.
I don't think we can jsut let people go free beyond all doubt would be an impossibile metrestick for a lawyer to reach a good defending lawyer could find one piece of evidence and just use that to hang the case.

who do you believe though

ask the prison population? and most of them will say they are inoccent!!!

i didn't do it, i was fitted up etc.

You'd be suprised, Taff. Once they get past the courts and are actually sent down, most know that they're in there for a reason. They don't tend to talk about it much though (depends on the inmate).

Before they get sentenced, of course, they do proclaim their innocence.

Taff, there was a Judge death quote there right?

Love it!

I guess in my flu addled state I did miss an implied in your first post.



FB

no frett

i do think we should bring back execution as a punishment.

only for the most heinous of crimes, after all the apeal proccesses have been exhausted. and it should be harvesting, let the wrong doer give back to the community in the most fundamental way, improving the lives of others at the cost of his own.

and yes the last one was judge death

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSssssssssssssssssssssss!!!!!

Judge death?

Do you mean Judge Dredd, as in "I am the law" and "The law doesn't... make mistakes. "

I (think I) have changed the title to be more respective of the actual conversation

Changed the title to correct spelling of the Judge's name.

(we wouldn't wish to annoy him, now would we?)

Going back to the original post, and then a later comment about bringing back the death penalty.

If we acknowledge that many people who are convicted are, in fact, innocent. And we bring back the death penalty - how many executions of innocent people is too many?

I didnt realise u can change the title but i am grateful not to ahve been cut down in a blast of sentencing fire.
I think that is the primary flaw with the death penalty - you can release imprisoned innoocents but cant save those executed.
However a few innoocents could be accepted (which really isnt a word i like to use here) as akin to some innoocents who spend their lives in jail and die while protesting their innoocence

tal

judge death was a super fiend from another dimension, where life was a crime and the punishment was death, he was an un-dead spirit animating a shell of a corpse, and came to judge dredd's mega city one to dispence his brand of justice, he kept popping back all the time because...........ssssssssssssss you can not kill what does not live sssssssssss

<< you can release imprisoned innoocents but cant save those executed.>>

if they had been executed by harvesting the deaths need not have been in vain, unlike other forms of execution where all you have is a dead person, harvesting gives life to others