It is better that ten guilty escape than that one innocent suffer; institutions must choose which error to prefer.
Blackstone's 1769 formulation. The ratio is a policy choice: raising it protects the innocent and releases more of the guilty, and every procedural rule about evidence implicitly picks a number.
In practice
- A disciplinary process that requires proof before dismissal will retain some people it should not; one that does not will dismiss some it should not, and the design is a choice between those.
- A spam filter tuned to catch everything will lose real mail; the setting is not a technical question but a decision about which error hurts more.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Rules that restrain power, and advice on using it