The Price of Justice

Here are two fundamental American values that I think generally serve as an overall detriment to the quality of our society:

1. It is better to let n guilty people go free than wrongly convict one innocent person
2. It is better to let n ineligible people vote than to wrongly disenfranchise one person

Sure, I will concede that to err on the side of precaution and protecting individual liberties the acceptable value of n should be greater than 1. But I think as a society we have adopted values for n that are too high.