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Sniffnoy comments on Rationality & Criminal Law: Some Questions - Less Wrong
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Fun crazy ideas that come to mind:
1) Punishments get scaled by the judged likelihood of guilt, i.e. judge says there's a 65% chance Bill is the killer, Bill gets 65% of the punishment.
2) All punishments become monetary fines varying by judged negative utility, i.e. Judge says murdering Joe was worth x negative utilons, Bill is fined to outweigh damage done with good.
Potential problems/thoughts: Bankruptcy? Lower bound on fines/guilt likelihood? Diminishing percieved utility of money/punishment in large amounts? How to measure negative utility of crime, positive utility of fine? How much should fine weigh compared to crime? Some/all money to victims/government/charity? Problems reaching accurate judgments? Inequality of man measured in punishment cause some complex problem? Lack of appearance of justice? Other complex effects on society?
Add your own for upvotes.
I think this would be very hard to make work as long as there remained a significant component of human judgment in determining probability of guilt. It seems much more likely that instead of working as intended, most of the time the people responsible would rationalize whatever probability of guilt would result in the level of punishment they wanted. You'd get very distorted probabilities out of this. Certainly we see that people do this from the historical cases mentioned in the article, when death sentences were required for many crimes, so juries adjusted accordingly.