Stephen King: To protect the innocent you may need to bail out the guilty

When should you protect the innocent even though you may, in the process, let off the guilty? A pacifist would presumably say "always" because war, by its very nature, leads to the slaughter of innocents (or, in our world of media spin, gives rise to "collateral damage"). Those in favour of zero tolerance for all forms of crime might have to say "never" because no judicial system is ever going to weed out those who truly are guilty from those who are wrongfully accused. And then, to make things more complicated, there are those occasions when saving the life of one innocent person requires the loss of another (think human shields or life-threatening child-birth).