- true accusation - punish the perpetrator
- false accusation - punish the accuser
- unable to confirm either way - nothing happens
I still don't understand why some people have so much trouble with this concept and want to bias towards "guilty until proven innocent" thinking.
And yes, I know that in civil cases in the US, it's "preponderance of the evidence" and not "presumption of innocence". It still means you should get punished only if your deed is proven (in Bayesian sense) more likely to be true than false.
Witch hunts are exciting. It's also empowering to believe that you're one of the "good guys", going after those dastardly "bad guys".
TBH, it's the same thinking behind any pogrom. "Those people" are rich, so breaking in and stealing everything is on the side of justice. "Those people" have secret cabals which rule the world, so it's OK to abuse and attack any individual you see.
The people with that attitude aren't aware of history. That attitude has been tried before in many countries. The end result is genocide.
It doesn't start out that way. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I still don't understand why some people have so
much trouble with this concept
From there it's a simple question of our willingness to let the guilty go free vs. our willingness to see the innocent wrongly punished. This is known as Blackstone's Ratio [1] and it dates to the 1760s.
Needless to say, there's a certain political equilibrium here; if you'll let off 1000 guilty people to avoid 1 wrongful conviction, you'll have a thousand victims and their families campaigning for tougher punishments for every 1 wrongfully convicted person campaigning in the opposite direction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation
> suggests an obvious
> course of action
It does happen, but it's so rare that it generally makes headlines when it does.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/28/how-many-...
The rate for those sentenced for lesser crimes is likely much higher, due to plea bargaining ("plead guilty to petty theft or we'll charge you with grand theft").
That's not really what we're talking about here, though. We're talking about the rate of conviction of those who are proven conclusively to have lied resulting in someone else being convicted of a crime.
Generally such people receive no consequences at all.
For instance, as far as I know the woman in this case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus
has not been charged with anything, despite falsely accusing an entire fraternity house of rape.