Au contraire, I'm talking about a rational, economics-and-efficiency
motivated, yes possibly extreme version of libertarian utopia. ;-) I'm
not arguing for totalitarianything.
> Something like 20% of the people who are convicted
> of capital crimes have their convictions reversed on appeal.
This is more or less a meaningless statistic. It just says that despite
mountains of case law accumulated over decades, our legal system still
can't make up its mind. Most of those overturned convictions are
reversed on the basis of some technical or procedural detail. Do you
feel good about the fact that a guy who (say) knifed somebody's grandma
for her purse in front of dozens of witnesses gets his conviction
overturned on appeal because he now says he felt "stressed and confused"
when he made his confession?
> This is generally either because they were innocent
Nobody's innocent. <grinz>
> I'm not even going to bother criticizing your proposed social system
Actually, I was looking for criticism, but cool, whatever. ;-)
> where a six-year-old can sell herself into prostitution for a lollipop
That's a parenting issue, not a legal one.
> or a junkie for a hit of junk.
They already do this in our *current* system, kemo sabe.
jb
PS - anybody who gets bent over the positions I'm taking here... well,
don't. I don't really have a firm position on anything, fundamentally
--- getting me to pin down what I actually believe is sort of like
trying to nail jelly to a tree. ;-) I think one or more of these
intermingled threads started off with the words "straw man." Adopting
these positions is just a kind of gedanken experiment. :-)