> The Court's job is ensure that the defendant receives due process.
Thank you for being the first commenter to give an answer to the actual question.
However, I do not think it really holds water. It does not seem to be the case that the prosecutor is the one to actually establish guilt. The guilty verdict is reached by a jury and a judge.
These get to value evidence according to a multitude of reasons, one of which is if it was acquired legally.
> wouldn't you agree maintaining such a system is more important than ensuring every last (actual) criminal who makes it to trial is convicted?
Oh, absolutely. The question is why principle would help? To put it very blunt, "if we let a few criminals loose then the police will stop breaking the law" does simply not make sense to me.
The widespread idea in the comments below that police somehow "profits" when someone is convicted does not make sense to me either.
Blackstone's Formulation, "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer", is a very influential idea in Western Justice systems. The idea is that the government has a stronger duty to protect innocent people than to punish guilty people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone's_formulation
> The Court's job is ensure that the defendant receives due process.
Thank you for being the first commenter to give an answer to the actual question.
However, I do not think it really holds water. It does not seem to be the case that the prosecutor is the one to actually establish guilt. The guilty verdict is reached by a jury and a judge.
These get to value evidence according to a multitude of reasons, one of which is if it was acquired legally.
> wouldn't you agree maintaining such a system is more important than ensuring every last (actual) criminal who makes it to trial is convicted?
Oh, absolutely. The question is why principle would help? To put it very blunt, "if we let a few criminals loose then the police will stop breaking the law" does simply not make sense to me.
The widespread idea in the comments below that police somehow "profits" when someone is convicted does not make sense to me either.