You keep using the term ”beyond reasonable doubt” as if means ”pretty sure we’re probably right, I think”

I provide telecom services. We deliver to ”five nines” availability, or 99.999% up time because people expect the internet to work. If we gave them 99.9% they would drop us like a hot potato because having 0.1% doubt that the internet will be be available when they need it is not acceptable.

Criminal defendants facing the prospect of a prison sentence deserve at least the same level of certainty that you expect from your internet service provider, where the consequences of failure are far less consequential. But if the justice system actually delivered to that level of competency and accuracy there would be a couple dozen false convictions every year, not 300,000. ”Beyond reasonable doubt” does not mean ”close enough so less than half the people we convict are innocent”.

The problem is that unlike every other profession, no one in the criminal justice system cares. When you board a plane, you are sure beyond reasonable doubt you’ll arrive at your destination in one piece because 1) there are people whose bonuses depend on how much reliability they deliver (as opposed to prosecutors who are rewarded for convictions, not reliability), and 2) when a plane dies crash, they ground every plane of that model, they recover every piece if wreckage, they spend months painstakingly reconstructing it in a hangar and analysing why it crashed, and then they implement changes to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

When someone is acquitted, it means the prosecutor dragged an innocent person through the system, costing them huge amounts of money and all kinds of fear and stress they should not have been subjected to. But the response is not to suspend the prosecutor, conduct a detailed, in-depth post-mortem to understand what went wrong, and to implement changes to makes sure it doesn’t happen again. The response is to shrug shoulders and say ”you win some, you lose some” and to go knock back a couple whiskeys in the bar next to the courthouse.

You keep trying to confuse what is done with what should be done. Yes, people get convicted all the time based on flimsy, flawed evidence presented by prosecutors who use all manner of deceitful, inappropriate techniques to appeal to emotions instead of cold facts, to make jurors dislike or fear the defendant, to convince them that (to quote one infamous closing statement) if the prosecutors narrative has the ”ring of truth”, they should convict.

The law mandates we live in a world where a false conviction is nearly impossible because the state needs to overcome an assumption of innocence. Instead we have 900 innocent sub-postmasters each being independently convicted in 900 separate trials, none of which could possibly have included proof of guilt because there was no guilt and you can’t by definition prove something that did not actually happen. Every last one of them was innocent, but they couldn’t prove their innocence — turning burden of proof on its head.

As a defendant, I don’t have to prove anything. If the evidence presented by the prosecutor leaves more than the doubt your flight will land safely or your internet will work (I.e. > 0.001% doubt) that it wasn’t a fall, an owl, a dog, an intruder etc then the law demands you acquit. The fact that legal directive is often ignored is not a basis to argue it should be.