Better that X guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer

Matteo Rizzolli and Margherita Saraceno

No 168, Working Papers from University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics

Abstract: The principle that it is better to let some guilty individuals be set free than to mistakenly convict an innocent person is generally shared by legal scholars, judges and lawmakers of modern societies. The paper shows why this common trait of criminal procedure is also efficient. It extends the standard Polinsky and Shavell (2007) model of deterrence and shows that when the costs of convictions are positive, and guilty individuals are more likely to be convicted than innocent individuals it is always efficient to minimize the number of wrongful convictions, while a more than minimal amount of wrongful acquittals may be optimal.

Keywords: Type I errors; Type II errors; evidence; optimal underdeterrence; Blackstone Pareto distribution; optimal screening (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K14 K41 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2009-07, Revised 2009-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.dems.unimib.it/repec/pdf/mibwpaper168.pdf First version, 2009 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mib:wpaper:168

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Matteo Pelagatti ().