[275] in libertarians
Re: Death Penalty
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barrie Greene)
Tue Sep 27 18:41:04 1994
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 94 18:37:58
From: bdgreene@MIT.EDU (Barrie Greene)
To: libertarians@MIT.EDU
<As long as we have the adversarial system there will be people who go
<free
<who shouldn't and people who are convicted and should be free. This
system
<of justice is not about finding the truth and putting the wrongdoers in
jail.
<It's about the prosecuter vs the defense and who wins. In the end
society loses
<by having some wrongdoers on the street and innocent people in jail.
But what is the alternative? Governmental "truth-finding committees"? Do
any of us really have that much faith in any government organization?
It's not that your average bureaucrat is necessarily uninterested in the
truth, just lazy -- if you are 99.9% sure the defendant is guilty, how
much effort will you expend hunting for exonerating evidence?
The adversarial system strikes me as fundamentally libertarian in
concept, as it is based on the idea that truth emerges through the free
competition of opposing ideas - as well as the idea that people work
harder when faced with competition. Sure, either the defense or
prosecution may be biased, but with both out there trying to win the
case, the jury should end up with as complete a picture as possible by
putting together the evidence from both sides.
Since humans are fallible, this doesn't ensure perfection, but it's the
best system anyone's come up with so far.
