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No amount of labor? Consider that statement very seriously. Would you seriously have executed that man if he were otherwise guaranteed to cure every form of cancer?
Everything about the justice system is an expected value calculation. If you let at most ten guilty men go free to save a innocent, you're implicitly saying that the risk of them committing crimes is outweighed by the good the innocent person could do. And you're also saying that an innocent person is worth less that the expected value of letting eleven criminals go free.
There are other problems with imprisonment for innocent people. A big one is that the state needs to have credibility on both ends. On the one hand (where the modern states fail IMO) is that it has the capacity and will to deal with actual crimes in a way that protects public order. When people have no reason to suspect that the government can and will deal with crime, you end up with various ad hoc solutions to crime that can escalate to the point of vigilante justice. On the other hand, a state that cannot reliably prosecute only the guilty or at least mostly the guilty (with the errors being mostly good faith mistakes) is one that loses public trust rather quickly. If I think that I’m going to be persecuted for thought crimes with a random prosecution, I’m not going to trust the police. You might not call on them and you might resist them. And the loss of trust is a detriment to stopping crime. This is why the defund movement is making crime worse. When you tell an entire population that the police exist to persecute them, they don’t cooperate and crime increases in that area. Then those people end up victimized by the criminals riding free because the cops are not trusted.
In case it's non-obvious, I'm making an argument about optimizing for expected efficiency, rather than saying there's any agreement about how many innocent people we would knowingly condemn to prison in order to keep guilty people imprisoned too. My claim is that we already make implicit cost-benefit calculations about what sort of false negative/false positive rates we're willing to accept from the justice system. Which, in turn, implies that we must also be placing an implicit, finite cost on how much damage we think particular crimes actually cost.
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No; there's also the harm of the imprisonment/execution of the innocent itself, and the second-order effects (you do not want the civilian population en masse to start treating the justice system as an occupying army).
I'm abbreviating for conciseness. Of course there's a lot of other factors that go into what false positive/negative rates we optimize our justice system to accept, like the risk of a justice system being seen as "soft" encouraging vigilantism and the degradation of state power.
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