It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

The saying expresses a core principle of liberal criminal justice: because the moral and social cost of punishing the innocent is irreparable, legal systems should be structured to minimize wrongful convictions even if that means some guilty people escape punishment. It aligns with the presumption of innocence and a high burden of proof (“better that ten guilty persons escape…”). Attributed to Voltaire, it is often invoked in debates about evidentiary standards, capital punishment, and due process, emphasizing that the legitimacy of law depends less on maximizing convictions than on avoiding catastrophic errors against the blameless.