The American Spectator : "Better a Hundred Terrorists Go Free…"

The American Spectator : "Better a Hundred Terrorists Go Free…": "There's a phrase repeated over and over by civil libertarian and ACLU types and often attributed to either Justice William O. Douglas or Justice Louis Brandeis:

'Better 100 guilty parties go free than one innocent person be convicted.'

I found the original reference is Blackstone and the figure is 10, not 100, but the point is the same. If the justice system is to err, it must err on the side of the criminal defendant.

I once wrote a book on crime and after hearing this phrase for about the 20th time, I came to one conclusion: Whoever said it wasn't planning on living in the same neighborhood with those 10 or 100 guilty criminals.

Over the last 40 years, a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings have turned criminal investigations into an incredible obstacle course, wringing just about every last trace of street smarts out of the law enforcement profession. I was talking to an emergency preparedness consultant at a New Year's Party and he burst out, 'I think I'm going to start a business training cops to be observant. They don't see anything anymore. You give them an assignment and they'll go and arrest someone, but they never notice anything along the way. There was an older generation of cops who were always picking things up but cops don't do that anymore.'"