It's baffling to me that people are treating "he will be found guilty" as evidence that he's already guilty and can be punished freely. We've got a code of laws specifically designed to avoid Inquisition-style "accusation of guilt is presumption of guilt" thinking.

In the past in Europe, there existed the concept of "partially guilty." Someone got shot and you were seen in the vicinity of the crime scene with a gun? You're 25% guilty. Then you're tortured (since you're 25% guilty, it's not torture of an innocent, but punishment), and under torture you "confess", making you fully guilty.

Source: Foucault's Discipline and Punish

That's absolutely fascinating, thank you. I need to finally suck it up and go read Discipline and Punish.

As much as I'm not on board with "confession through torture", I wonder if non-boolean guilt could help sort out some of the dumber quirks of our legal system. As is we just have "innocent" and "guilty" (which is either 51% chance of guilt in civil cases, or 'beyond reasonable doubt' in criminal ones).

But we're clearly fumbling around for new values. The Supreme Court decision about retrials (that "probably would have been found innocent at original trial" is not enough to justify a retrial) clearly makes more sense in terms of real-valued guilt - we can then set some actual standard for retrial, which is different from the standard for conviction. Perhaps you get convicted at 90% guilty in criminal cases, but don't get to open a retrial unless your estimate drops to 70% guilty.

Now I'm fascinated. What would real-valued guilt look like in a modern system?

Upvote upvote upvote. This is a non issue. Indefinite detention is unconstitutional I don't care what a judge says. This isn't debatable, very few things are this clear.