I'm not arguing that people who are wrong in good faith be punished, just that we punish people who we can prove lied in order to retaliate against people they don't like.
The difference is the police won't go after false reporting often, probably because they are worried it will have a chilling effect on people talking to them.
If 10% of murder convictions are mistaken it would stand to reason that the false accusation conviction error rate would be equally high or higher.
It's fun to say, punish everyone that does crime X. But you have to accept a false positive rate.
Why in the world would you be sure of that?
> Why in the world would you be sure of that?
A democracy
(Whether it's worth that deterrent is a question that I am not going to attempt to grapple with on a technology message board.)
Jesus, jail time! I can tell you right off the bat that that would absolutely disincentivise me from reporting anything - some process I'm not privy to decides it was a 'false' report and I get jail? That makes for a very high bar for me not to wind my neck back in - and if that's what you want, only something that's too heinous to ignore gets reported, fine. But it's certainly not an insane suggestion that there's a link there.