Blackstone's ratio

In criminal law, Blackstone's ratio is the ratio between letting guilty unpunished (error of impunity) and convicting innocent people, two forms of miscarriage of justice. The Blackstone's formulation by the English jurist William Blackstone in his seminal work Commentaries on the Laws of England in the 1760s is:

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

There is also a long pre-history of similar sentiments going back centuries in a variety of legal traditions. The idea subsequently became a staple of legal thinking in jurisdictions with legal systems derived from English criminal law and continues to be a topic of debate. In the United States, high courts in individual states continue to adopt specific numerical values for the ratio, often not 10:1. As of 2018, courts in 38 states have adopted such a position.

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