The Legal Theory Blog highlights The Source of Blackstone's Intuition: Why We Think it Better to Free the Guilty than to Convict the Innocent by Sam Vermont. Here is the abstract:
What is the source of the intuition, famously articulated by William Blackstone, that it is better to let a multitude of guilty persons escape than to convict an innocent person? This paper argues that a main source of the intuition is a bias against conviction that arises from various psychological quirks. These quirks simply render false conviction more salient than false acquittal.
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