Sir William Blackstone famously said that it is "better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer." The maxim expressed by that English jurist was perhaps no more popular in 1765 than it is today.
In a jibe clearly directed at Blackstone and others of a similar mind, English jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham made light of writers call it better to save "several guilty men, than to condemn a single innocent man," and others who, "to make the maxim more striking, fixed on the number ten." Others "made this ten a hundred," and still others "made it a thousand." Such "candidates for the prize of humanity" go so far as to say that "nobody ought to be punished, lest an innocent man be punished."
