Plea bargaining needs to go, it's letting evidence that wouldn't stand up in court send people to prison.
While the wheels of Justice turn slowly, plea agreements are the oil that keeps the wheels turning at all. Think about it -- if you're speeding, and you know you're speeding, do you really want to take time from a Judge and a Trooper to have them present evidence to know that you're speeding? Even more so, if the trooper wrote your ticket so you don't get any points -- just a fine? Better yet...do you want someone to sit in jail if they're innocent because he can't afford his bail to sit longer because of all of the backlog?
I would argue that is the correct outcome. At this point, we either adjust policy/law to reduce the backlog (decriminalize drug possession, etc). Or, we commit to the path of criminalizing everything and tax and spend accordingly.
People will either pay more taxes to fund it (unlikely) or change their tolerance of what actions they want prosecuted
Might say something about how much we really value that ideal.
You're right that it's nice in some ways to be able to reach plea agreements. To the extent the system can depend on them in order to get things done, though, that means there are incentives for suboptimal outcomes.
Which rapidly leads to a problem of funding and/or justice.
If the wheels are grinding innocent people down, maybe they shouldn't be turning quite so fast.
There are always unintended consequences, and constitutional guarantees are usually too blunt of an instrument to be very useful in ending most social problems. They're too easy to get around, and courts are not institutionally capable of policing all the myriad games governments can play. Legislation is far more effective as an objective matter (and that is indeed it's function in our system), yet most people seem to prefer constitutional rules instead of legislation even while intuitively understanding that legislation is not very effective at forcing social or institutional change.
In the case of the latter and other serious offenses it's simple restrict sentences to what was offered in a plea bargain excepting situations in which an offer was contingent upon giving evidence against another.
Its still perfectly possible to deal with traffic and other tickets mostly without court at all and plea bargains designed to make cases in which guilt is unambiguous go quicker by agreement between defense and prosecution about a fair penalty can still be negotiated.
If there is any doubt of guilt or a fair sentence let it be adjudicated and let us bear the cost as the cost of a fair system.
If you eliminate plea bargaining without solving the real problem (the excessive leverage), the you get the worst of all worlds: choked courts, delayed justice, and long sentences.
If that bankrupts the state, that's OK with me.
Not that I don't think people who are wrongly incarcerated shouldn't be compensated but it's not so cut and dry.
Yes.
>Even if proven innocent your future prospects could be shot not to mention intangibles like lost relationships, losing pets.
These should be compensated for too. Lost relationships I think are worth a cool $1M.
If the state can't afford all this, then they shouldn't put people in jail unless they're really sure they need to.
Presumably, once exonerated, you are employable at some level, so replacing your previous income for the rest of your life is probably inappropriate. OTOH, the lost continuity has an ongoing impact that ought to be addressed somehow.
This just adds financial disincentive for pursuing highly paid individuals. (Doctors, lawyers, CEOs...) Whereas the state could afford the risk to go after lesser paid citizens.
Now the wealthy citizens wouldn't even need to lawyer up.
The whole concept of jail is just wrong and outdated. Unless someone is violent, they shouldn't be in jail at all to await trial. It costs taxpayers money and is pointless and destroys the lives of the accused, who are innocent until proven guilty at trial. If they're violent, there must be real evidence that they are, and in that case there should be no bail allowed (and if there's not enough evidence that conviction is a slam-dunk, then let them go until the trial). If there's not enough evidence because the police body-cams "weren't working", that's the police's fault.
Many get so many cases they just can't handle the load, so they have to move quickly.
There's a documentary out there somewhere that goes into detail. It's staggering, and somewhat sickening. There are "good" public defenders though. How to spot a "good" one? See how many of their cases go to trial.
As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargaining_in_the_United_... says, plea bargaining was considered unconstitutional until 1970. It happened, and on a large scale, but such pleas would not stand up under appeal. (Typical lawyer trick, get people to agree to something they can't legally be held to, and as long as they don't realize that it isn't binding, you get your way.)
The case https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/397/742/case.htm... established plea bargaining, but said, Of course, the agents of the State may not produce a plea by actual or threatened physical harm or by mental coercion overbearing the will of the defendant. I, and many others, would argue that giving the person a choice between years in jail if they fight versus weeks if they plea, is exactly such coercion.
The USA keeps a larger portion of its population in prison than any other country in the world. By a lot. Our plea bargain system is part of how we do that.
Instead people are given the choice between say 6 months in prison or risk 15 years in prison. You end up sending innocent people to jail for long periods while obviously guilty people get vastly reduced penalties for not wasting the courts time.
PS: Alternatively, if a prosecutor offers someone a plea with X charges, they can only charge someone with those same charges.
People should be allowed to plead guilty if they want to, but they shouldn't get any reduced punishment for it. No innocent person should ever be faced with the choice of accepting a certain lesser punishment or an uncertain greater punishment.
https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2013/01/15/plea-bargaining-a...
When I first walked in the door, I had a number of charges that added up to a potential first-offender maximum of 48 years. Anything that they think they may conceivably want to try to prove in court will be on your charge sheet. It is far easier to drop charges off than it is to add them in.
It isn't that you get a 'discount' for pleading, it's a strong-arm tactic to scare you into taking a deal. Taking a deal saves the state money, but more importantly (to the actors involved) it takes little time. Prosecutors can quickly rack up felony convictions (which is how they are judged) with little effort.
You get what you measure.
That's an excellent way to put it
Plus of course the lack of elected prosecutors and the existence of the independent bar (barristers) who often prosecute and defend reduces the madness of prosecutors bragging about almost perfect conviction rates. The system over here isn't perfect but I'd rather face it than any other as an innocent accused.
I mean, you'd have to come up with some sort of reliable test for what abusing the system is. That means you'd essentially have to have rules for prosecutors' discretion, which sort of defeats the idea of discretion.
I understand the ideal of plea bargains, but I can't think of how to make them work without inviting bad situations, particularly for those that suffer more from drawn out litigation or have reason to suspect the system wouldn't find them correctly innocent.
It's easy to find terribly egregious scenarios, but plenty of others become quite subjective, and yet still very manipulative. Honest question, do you have a proposed solution that doesn't remove plea bargains entirely?
No it doesn't. Their discretion for who and what to prosecute are already limited by the criminal code created by the relevant legislature. Judges have a lot more discretion than prosecutors but they too are limited by a variety of factors including minimum sentencing laws and public pressure (since many are elected).
Besides, prosecutors already have too much discretion if they can use false positive tests and the threat of a jury sentencing to bully innocent people into becoming felons.
> Honest question, do you have a proposed solution that doesn't remove plea bargains entirely?
There are a number of solutions, just look at the Wikipedia page on plea bargaining [1]. Plea bargains are illegal in countries like Denmark and severely restricted elsewhere like the UK and Estonia. This is trodden territory.
> There are a number of solutions...Plea bargains are illegal in countries like Denmark and severely restricted elsewhere like the UK and Estonia.
That sounds an awful lot like saying "No, you remove them entirely, or almost entirely" Since I was asking someone that said they wanted to keep plea bargains how they pictured that, I'm not sure what point you were trying to make. Can you elaborate?
The whole point is to reduce court load and create leverage when trying to convince someone to become state's witness (which is controversial as well). How does placing concrete limits on plea bargains doing away with them "entirely or almost entirely?" Estonia's and France's systems, for example, allow largely unrestricted plea bargains in the vast majority of cases, thus freeing the court for more important cases that carry large penalties while preventing prosecutors from bullying innocent people for the sake of their career.
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/7-ways-police-break-law-thr...