With the Judicial Process model we strive to answer three questions:
1) How many guilty people are we willing to let go free to prevent one innocent person from being convicted?
2) How long a sentence is appropriate if convicted?
3) If there are mitigating circumstances, how much if any should the sentence reduction be?
It seems obvious, to me at least, that the answer is different depending on the crime. So I propose to look at two very different crimes. The crime of simple unarmed burglary and the crime of rape.
Since Risk Analysis is a numeric technique it requires a numeric output. So the question is what shall be our output. The original quote from William Gladstone talks of the suffering of the convicted innocent person. This suggests to me that a measure of "degree of suffering" should be the output of the model. If I were developing the model I would therefore create a numeric "Pain Index" and the output of the model would be in terms of pain as defined by this index. We would then design our judicial system to create the least pain. However, In doing this we will consider not just the pain of the innocent convicted person, we will also consider the pain of victims and their loved ones. Included in the group of victims is not just the victim of the case being tried, but possible future victim of a guilty person.
You may be of the opinion that we can't quantify pain. But all this means is that it is difficult and personal. When you have to assign a number to the amount of pain caused to an innocent man by spending a year in jail and then must assign a number to the pain of a woman raped it causes you to decide, are these really equal, or is one worse than the other. If so how much worse. Ten percent, a hundred percent and etc.
I will go into more details on how we might develop the output and what issues developing the output will force us to think about in the next post.
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Interesting effort; I hope you'll move forward with it. I've thought about this a bit, and much along the lines you seem to be moving. From a "least pain" standpoint, it might well be better to put all 10 men in prison even knowing that one was innocent, than to release all 10 and let the nine who were guilty go out to commit more crimes.
On the other hand, is that the extent of the "least pain" analysis? In fact, is this even the basis of our constitutional approach? I'm not so sure. I think we stack the deck against the state mostly to keep the state in check -- to avoid the abuse of prosecutorial resources and misconduct. See: http://bit.ly/52bqv2.
Hope you're enjoying retirement, and that you find a moment to continue this!
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