Satius est impunitum relinqui facinus nocentis, quam innocentem damnari

Sometime back I saw this quoted on a friend of a friend's facebook with the following comment:


"Why is this is in the Corpus Iuris Civilis but not anywhere I know of in common law? Aren't we supposed to be more advanced (therefore compassionate) than the bloody Romans?!"

The latin statement translates something like "Rather a crime go unpunished than an innocent be punished". I know very little about latin and law. Yet I do believe it was Sir William Blackstone the English jurist and law professor at Oxford that wrote in his Commentaries on the Laws of England:


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

The phrase itself is already rather famous, and all it took was a quick search in wikiquote to get the exact wording and source. Thus extrapolating from the guy's already flawed reasoning, one might almost conclude that Common Law is TEN times "more advanced (therefore compassionate) than the bloody Romans".  

Hehe. This post (as with most of my other posts) doesnt actually have a point, but if you expected one you obviously didnt read the title of this blog.