A question for you, all!

I've got a hypothetical question for all you people killing time and braving boredom here. Consider: your girlfriend (if you do not have one, use your imagination, you right-hand lovers) has been abducted and consequently tortured, raped and murdered. Police find the killer and he is given a fair trial. Meanwhile a completely innocent 18-year old kid is being falsely accused of some horrible crimes and faces double life sentence in a maximum security prison.

And you get to choose. Either you lock up the criminal who abducted your girlfriend. Or you let the innocent kid go. You cannot pick both. The choice falls between doing justice to the killer, or saving an innocent kid from rotting away in a jail cell.
Save the kid, let a rapist/killer loose. Lock up the rapist/killer, and you condemn the kid to hell.

I would have to save the innocent kid.

It's not guaranteed that the criminal will commit another crime but it's guaranteed that the kid is innocent and being punished for nothing and condemned to hell as you said.

That's a pretty good response. Most people I ask this question say that they would let the innocent kid go and then either kill the rapist themselves or hire a hitman to kill the rapist.

I would say that too, only because it has not happened to me and (knock on wood) it hopefully will not. My mom was mugged at gun point not to long ago and I wanted nothing but to kill the SOB's that did that to her. To this day I still hate the cops that are really good at writing tickets but not busting real criminals. Anyway, it is easy to say we would let the innocent kid go free when you are not in a violent rage.

I would have to say , I would put the criminal away.
Most countries have an appeal system in place for those that
truly are innocent , yet convicted.
I would then get that kid the best lawyer
there is.......
and hope being in jail didn't do much harm to the kid!