Not so simple. It depends on the evidence the prosecution brings. If they come in with nothing, you'll win. More often than not, they have a lot of evidence.
There is no requirement for the prosecution to provide a clear case (or even a weak one) at the time of presenting a plea bargain. They often use the extremity of the charges as their hand.
John Oliver did a piece on public defenders that talks a lot about plea bargains, amongst other problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USkEzLuzmZ4
Here's a study from the Department of Justice:
https://www.bja.gov/Publications/PleaBargainingResearchSumma...
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (2005), in 2003 there were 75,573 cases disposed of in federal district court by trial or plea. Of these, about 95 percent were disposed of by a guilty plea (Pastore and Maguire, 2003). While there are no exact estimates of the proportion of cases that are resolved through plea bargaining, scholars estimate that about 90 to 95 percent of both federal and state court cases are resolved through this process (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2005; Flanagan and Maguire, 1990).
> As prosecutors have accumulated power in recent decades, judges and public defenders have lost it. To induce defendants to plead, prosecutors often threaten “the trial penalty”: They make it known that defendants will face more-serious charges and harsher sentences if they take their case to court and are convicted. About 80 percent of defendants are eligible for court-appointed attorneys, including overworked public defenders who don’t have the time or resources to even consider bringing more than a tiny fraction of these cases to trial. The result, one frustrated Missouri public defender complained a decade ago, is a style of defense that is nothing more than “meet ’em and greet ’em and plead ’em.”
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...
A lawyer lying in court should be risking their own livelihood at least, with prison as a certainty for attempting to manipulate the court to imprison someone through deceit.
It's probably already part of the system, right?
If I remember correctly, the defendants had run out of money, the private lawyer they hired was increasingly doing things pro-bono (and losing focus because of it), and they had already disrupted their lives for two years. Each court date required hours of travel for both of them and days off work. They'd get there, only to have the prosecution kick the can down the road and have the court date postponed for another few weeks, in which case they'd have to do it all over again.
That they lasted as long as they did is a testament to them, but the system wore even them down.
To add a whole new angle of going after the prosecutors for contempt would have increased the stress on their lives and resources by an order of magnitude.
Wow, this is not true at all. Unfortunately, for many jurors simply being charged with a crime is evidence of said crime. The prosecution wields an amazing amount of power, and based on a lot of the news stories coming out they abuse said power. Remember, prosecutors are not rewarded for finding the truth, but for convictions.