You say that as if these were mistakes or unfortunate culminations of circumstance. The man committed fraud and sent innocent, grieving parents to prison by proxy. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that to be 0.00% and punish those harshly who exceed that metric.
I would need a very very big pile of very clear cut evidence to find someone guilty of a crime where the likely outcome is a substantial prison time.
It's all tradeoffs, but "his blood was found on the murder weapon" wouldn't be sufficient for me - some childhood enemy could easily have planted a bunch of forensic evidence next to a crime scene.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of crimes don't produce evidence that rises to the level you call for.
After all, if my next door neighbour barged into my house and beat me up, the only evidence would be my visible injuries and my statement that it was my neighbour.
I'm not sure if I'd prefer a society where he would be convicted, or where he wouldn't.
Maybe your neighbour has a nicer car than you which makes you feel insecure so you decide to beat yourself up and go to the police saying your neighbour did it.
Considering that possibility, I don't want to put your neighbour in prison.
And presumably, if having been denied justice I pursue revenge instead, I can barge into his home and beat him up, as he did to me, and avoid punishment for the same reason?
While I admire your devotion to Blackstone's Ratio, this doesn't seem like a recipe for stability and rule of law to me.
A murderer who kills 1% of the people he meets has certainly committed a crime. A person who has a 99% chance of being a murderer has not certainly committed a crime.
That is depending on your threshold of certainty. 1% is not that high considering that, according to the OJJDP, 5 milion people were arrested for serious charges in 2019 so with a 1% false positive rate that would be 100,000 people falsely imprisoned every year.
It does not have to be and really can't be 0% but 1% is unreasonably high in my opinion. If it can't be helped then it can't be helped but that isn't necessarily the case with these devices.
The wikipedia page is heartbreaking. Griefing parents sent to jail, their other children taken away and placed in foster care... So many lifes made miserable by one person...
Additionally it could be made a requirement that, like in professional sports, two or three blood drafts are taken - one sample is analyzed and one is either kept until the case is closed or analyzed at a different lab if the evidence is contested.
This method doesn't protect against evidence tampering. Someone can just take a drop of that blood and smear it on the victims clothes. Now it doesn't matter how many labs analyze it, it's always going to come back a match...
