If serving on a jury and faced with an insanity plea,...

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Good question. I personally believe in the maxim of, I'd rather let 1,000 guilty people go free than have 1 innocent person go to prison.

A few years ago in Texas, there was a court trial of a local long-time criminal who had been charged with burglary. All along he swore up and down that he didn't do it, but he did not remember where he was at the time in question.

During the trial, someone said something that stirred his memory -- at the time of the burglary he was in jail in another county 100 miles away. He told his lawyer and the lawyer told the judge. They called the sheriff of the other county to testify and to bring his jail book (or whatever it is called). The next day the sheriff of the other county was sworn in and showed in his book that the defendant really was in his jail on the day in question for some completely unrelated reason. Clearly, he was innocent of that crime.

The judge then informed the jury that they must find him not guilty because of the evidence. As I understand it, the jury was upset -- they wanted to go ahead and convict the defendant and send him to prison because they knew he was sure to commit more crimes in the area -- but they reluctantly voted not guilty as ordered by the judge.

I don't know whether to believe the story. The person who told me about this didn't know who the defendant actually was.

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In another case in the 1960's, there was someone from a distant state living in another nearby town who was continually getting into trouble with the law. The local law enforcement wanted to get rid of him for good. At last, they got their chance.

He committed some crime that could get him a year in the county jail, but they didn't know if they could make it stick. Instead of holding him in jail until trial with some high bond figure or dismissing the charges, they released him on $5 bond.

I'm not positive what happened, but I think that one of the officers made sure that he could overhear him speak and then "protested" to the prosecutor that the prisoner would probably jump bond for such a small bond and the prosecutor replied to the officer within hearing of the defendant that while they wouldn't hunt anyone down over a $5 bond, if the defendant did jump bond and ever came back into the county for any reason, they would put him in prison for 5 years or more.

They guy took the "hint" and jumped bond a couple of days later and has apparently been careful not to even enter the state again.

However, if the probability that someone will commit such a crime again given that they have already committed such a crime is greater than 0.1%... well, in the case of murder you've now condemned someone to be murdered because you didn't want to lock up an innocent person for life. Do realise that such a maxim means you're setting P(guilty)>99.9% in order to convict, so you won't convict someone who's 98% likely to have committed the crime.

Isn't the standard, "proven beyond a reasonable doubt"?

Ultimately, crime is not something we have all that much control over. It is impossible for any society to solve the problem of crime without ensnaring so many of the innocent. (Basically, to reduce your false negatives, you'd have to increase your false positives.) We want to minimize the probabilities of an innocent person suffering because that's something we CAN do.

If you were to make the system where it would ensnare a lot of innocent people, then people will wonder, What is the purpose of virtue if it provides no security? What is the purpose of obeying all the laws if there's a fair chance you'd be arrested, convicted, and sentenced anyway?

As John Adams argued in court in defense of the soldiers charged with murder for the Boston Massacre:

Yes! And it appears to be the standard that best balances the need to enforce the laws and the need to ensure that innocents are not ensnared.