Quote:
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if we truly feel that, "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer," then we cannot accept a system that interferes with the rights of 10,000 citizens in order to remove weapons from 160 of them.
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I think Blackstone meant that it was better to let ten guilty people go free rather than convict an innocent person.
This was at a time that England had more than 200 crimes where the punishment was death so a wrongful conviction had severe consequences.
I don’t think Blackstone was referring to stop and frisks as the penalty for stopping and frisking an innocent person does not have the same impact as executing an innocent person.