Unfortunately, this is not a rare case. We have locked up a lot of innocent people.
There appear to be two persuasions here: those who believe it is worse to let a guilty man free than to jail an innocent man; and those who believe it is worse to jail an innocent man than to let a guilty man free. Now the presumption of innocence would appear to favor the latter persuasion but in practice, by my observation and experience on juries, there is no presumption of innocence. There is a complex weave of prejudices, biases, and profiling that shape each individual juror. In the jury room, it's a real mess to begin with but, again in my experience, often rational progress can be made through discussion.
But how do you repay a man like this?
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