As I understand it the length of sentence with a plea bargain is so significantly reduced that there is a huge incentive for innocent people to plead guilty to avoid the risks. And to testify against others who have not plead guilty. Lawyers will encourage innocent people to plead guilty.
This seems to go against the idea of innocent until proven guilty. I cannot find data on how many innocents this is sending to prison “The overwhelming majority of the people living in prisons today are there because they took a plea bargain. And an unknowable number of them are innocent of the crimes they admitted to.” My most extreme political position
Provocative and interesting article, thanks for the share. Don’t agree with all of it, but would like to read more by the author.
I’m from the UK, where we do not have plea bargains negotiated, but there is an automatic reduction in sentence of 1/3 for most crimes following a guilty plea. The Sentencing Guidelines Council is explicit that this is for utilitarian reasons (saving court time/money) rather than any notion of the fact that remorse is a mitigating factor.
Obviously, there will be a lot of people who are guilty who then plead guilty, but the problem is in the atypical cases. There is some sense in incentivising people to plead guilty, else every defendant would ask for a trial because ‘why not?’. Also this would be traumatic for victims in some cases.
And obviously in the fringe cases, the incentives change. Particularly when the sentence is likely to be exemplary. I’ve got no sympathy at all for people who were rioting in the UK, but many will have faced the choice of “2 years prison now” or “a lengthy and maybe expensive trial then a fair bit longer in prison”. Whether you are factually guilty will be less influential as a factor in decision making than how likely YOU think you are to be found guilty. At least if the defendant is rational.
And that’s not even considering other incentives, like what else you can negotiate if you provide a guilty plea.
I am from Germany, where plea bargains also do not exist. Nor does the jury system as known in the US. In my mind the unpredictability of jury outcomes is related to the plea bargain dilemma. Frequently, neither defendant nor prosecution seem able to predict jury decisions. This unpredictability in my mind does not speak well for the idea of corralling explicitly non-expert, random citizens into a situation that many don’t want to enter, and which costs many of them income. Is it truly productive to hinge decisions on which side, defense or prosecution, best finds the emotional buttons of enough jurors?
The astronomical cost of defending oneself, added to these apparently near random outcomes makes me suspicious of how justice is understood in the US judicial system. I have heard arguments from fervent believers in the jury notion. But the concept seems shaky to me.
