Why does the legal system protect the criminal more than the victims?

Answer 1

Technically, the "victim" in criminal cases is the state (or nation if it is a federal crime). That is why criminal cases are named State v Defendant. So the system is designed to try to balance the rights of the state with those of the individual subject to its powers. It is at times a delicate balance, but traditionally, court case law has decided that if the scale should tilt, it should tilt in favor of the defendant given the vast and possibly unchecked power of the state in the equation. As others have said, better that 10 guilty people go free than 1 innocent be convicted.

Answer 2

The American justice system started out with a good idea and it has devolved.

If you go back to the Salem witch trials, anybody could accuse a person of being a witch. There obviously could not be any evidence. The only people who knew for sure, according to the "legal" principles at the time were the suspect and Satan. Since you could not trust the suspect to tell the truth, their testimony was meaningless. So a lot of inocent people died.

Likewise, the king or other government representatives could incaracerate people on a whim. It was an oppressive system that easily allowed abuses of authority.

Our Founding Fathers wanted to limit those abuses, so they came up principles like "trial by jury" and "a fair and speedy trial." Concepts like habeus corpus, innocent until proven guilty and all those good things our system were invented to protect citizens from oppressive and arbitray imprisonment and prosecution.

Then things started to get out of hand. The average American prisoner lives better than the average Third World citizen because bleeding hearts decided to push the concept"cruel and unusual punishment" to the extreme. Now preventing cruel and unusual punishment means giving prisoners better lives than most of the people in the world have.

Who says it is better to let let 10 guilty people to go free than to punish one innocent person?

After all, has it not been proven over and over again that iour system often convicts innocent people AND sets the guilty free.

Answer 3

This is only in the United States where the human rights organizations seem to litigate every sentence against a criminal whether justified or not. I would never want to see a truly innocent person incarcerated, however, I see no good being done with so many criminals getting off on technicalities all in the name of "fairness" and "civil rights."

Answer 4

It might of start out right at one time but things have gone very wrong when you now a person is guilty and gets of because a jiugy says the proof get throw out due to wrongful serach or other stuped things and it does not help when are government is as cruiped as much as criminals. When are the people going to stand up and say no more with all of it.

Answer 5

It doesn't!

It just seems that way at times.

The Rationale is that "Better should all the Guilty go free than an innocent man spend one day in prison!"

Not only does this rationale usually work best under the circumstances - but it is the Only Justice System that we have!

And Yes! It is not perfect!

Answer 6

Because the "human rights" babies cry every time a murderer gets a cold bowl of cereal or misses their favorite tv show.
They seem to forget that the criminal didn't have any concern for the rights of their victims. The criminal's "rights" should be forfeit.

Answer 7

Because the way our legal system is set up, we would rather see 10 guilty people go free than send 1 innocent person to jail.

Answer 8

It doesn't. It zealously protects the innocent from unfair prosecution. However, the result of that is sometimes to favor the guilty. It is better to let 10 guilty men go free than imprison a single innocent man.

Answer 9

Because the communist entity known as the ACLU says so.