The premise it&#x27;s all wrong. The reason we let an &quot;innocent&quot; person go free it&#x27;s because you don&#x27;t have enough evidence to prove that it is guilty in the first place. Imprisoning that person anyway just to be &quot;safe&quot; won&#x27;t make you safer since the actual guilty person may still be around. If that is the case then you effectively pardoned him&#x2F;her while exacting punishment on an innocent.<p>It&#x27;s very easy to talk about the &quot;innocent&quot; person in the abstract but if you happen to be the innocent you will care very much about being punished without having actually committed any crimes.