Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2001 19:30:55 -0400
To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
From: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
Subject: Re: Death by cop Colorado police shoot civilians - lots of them
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"

Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2001 12:31:19 -0700
To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
From: James Bradley <jbradley@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Death by cop Colorado police shoot civilians - lots of them
Cc: Eric.J.Ross@robin.mail.pas.earthlink.net 
(Editorial@boulderweekly.com), Editor@boulderweekly.com, spiker 
<spiker@ev1.net>

Matt,

This Boulder Weekly piece you linked is the poorest written editorial 
I can remember. It purports to be about one thing--the execution of 
people by Colorado police and justification of same--but it wanders 
all over the place, espousing rambling, heresay supported opinions on 
a variety of topics only tangentially related.

Most offensive is the poorly considered note about our country 
"tolerating" the convicting of innocent people by the justice system.

It is not possible to design a justice system that never convicts and 
incarcerates innocent people, unless you never incarcerate anyone. If 
you state it as your primary criteria that your justice system must 
never incarcerate an innocent person, period, then all you can do is 
let everyone go free. It is an inevitable consequence of locking 
people up that innocent people will sometimes get locked up. The 
idea, of course, is to minimize the frequency of this occurrence. 
This notion is one of the cornerstones of our system of justice. We 
are much more likely to let a guilty person go free, by virtue of a 
reasonable doubt, than we are to incarcerate an innocent person. So 
do we "tolerate" it? Yes, and it is necessary that we do, it is not 
wrong that we do, as the tone of this piece implies.

The fact that it is possible to convict an innocent person is, of 
course, one of the arguments against the death penalty.

jb


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