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Absent other factors, and assuming murderous criminality has a strong genetic basis, Blackstone's ratio might result in a high level of murderous criminality in the general population as the innocent are butchered faster than they can reproduce.
From this perspective, a 1:1 ratio or even a 10:1 ratio allowing for many innocent convictions will reduce the genetic propensity for murderous violence.
Aka "kill everyone and let God sort them out".
If you hang a man at p(murderer)=0.5, you are not increasing justice at all.
Of course, the threshold on p(murderer) must be low enough that you can achieve general deterrence. If you require ten upstanding citizens giving eyewitness reports under oath to convict a murderer, this will make it very easy to commit murder without facing consequences.
I think that murders by private citizens are only a small fraction of the homicides committed in the last few hundred years or so. They happen, but the median homicide victim was probably killed in state-sponsored violence.
You would certainly cut down on private murders if you allowed cops to shoot whomever they feel are up to no good. But this will reliably lead to the "up to no good" designation being applied to political enemies, entrenching whomever is in power, which is generally a terrible idea.
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I can make assumptions too! Assuming that a large portion of the population has a genetic propensity not to commit violent crime if not committing such guarantees that they will not be convicted of it, and also a genetic propensity, if they are likely to be convicted of horrifying crimes whether or not they committed them, to lash out against the system that put them in such an impossible position out of spite (defecting against those who defected against them in the previous round), rejecting Blackstone might result in more violence than a few 'orrible murderers getting away with their deeds.
--William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
--Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex, August 2014
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If all you were concerned about was long term genetic propensity to violence, couldn't you just introduce castration as a "lower tier" punishment that you dish out more readily?
Castration would probably be a good two-for: it would probably lower the propensity to violence directly (see steers vs bulls), and stop them from reproducing. You probably wouldn't even need to imprison most of them. I would actually argue it would be more humane than locking people up for decades, as we do in the US.
(Although, as an aside, I think murder numbers among any demographic would need to be significantly higher than they are for Blackstone's ratio to actually result in murderers killing faster than the birth rate. The United States may have higher violent crime rates than Europe, but even with Blackstone's ratio as an inherited principle of our common law legal system, we're still far from that fate.)
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