If you believed the possible punishment were indeed proportional to the crime, would you still be outraged at plea bargaining? And would the same logic apply to any variance reduction strategy (like insurance) or just this one?
Because you don't get one of the fundamental constitutional rights our country was founded on: The right to a jury. Prosecutors should be forced to face a jury.
In a plea bargain, the state is recognizing your right to a trial; that’s why they can’t just give you the punishment directly! They are offering a reduced sentence in exchange for you waiving that right. At no point is the right not recognized, unless you think that’s what happens with guilty pleas too.
(Edited to provide explanation rather than funny but confusing skit.)
That effectively removes your right to a jury trial, particularly when the natural human tendency of a juror is to split the baby, i.e. if you get charged with 60 counts they're unlikely to find you "not guilty" on all 60 regardless of circumstances.
I agree with OP - if the crime isn't important enough to take to trial, it's not important enough to prosecute. Furthermore I would add judges should sanction prosecutors for overcharging. If I have $100k in cash I put into the bank in $5k increments that's one charge of Structuring with a potential five year sentence - I shouldn't be looking at twenty charges with a century in jail if I refuse the plea.
The problem is the incentives are set up such that the charges will not be reasonable. They can't be reasonable, since the state can't possibly afford to take more than a tiny percentage of cases to trial. Which sets up another incentive - the state must make an example out of people who demand a trial to encourage everyone else to take the plea.
To gozur88 if you see this, I am pretty worried about this too, and it seems like a huge violation of our rights that charges can be placed on individuals simply for leverage in a negotiation between the state and the individual. It is actually pretty absurd that we allow any kind of negotiation whatsoever in criminal courts because the usual principles of consent that are usually prerequisites to legally binding negotiations are absent. An individual is threatened with violence and then from that position are not on equal footing with the prosecution.
There's an increasing delay between when a comment is posted and when you can reply, based on the depth. The idea is to create a "cooldown" period for people who are upset. You would have been able to reply to my comment eventually.
Even on a too-crude statistical level we can see the problem: if an innocent person has a 20% chance of being convicted, but the offered plea bargain is 1 year and the maximum sentence is 10 years, innocent people will do better by pleading guilty. The "10 years" is a problem, but it's a consequence of wanting to drive plea bargains.
(The fundamental problem in this case is the 20% chance, but frankly no one seems to have any hope for a system that doesn't regularly convict innocents.)
This is why most societies allow guilty pleas in the first place!
A plea bargain is nothing but a guilty plea + certainty about the sentence. If you're okay with guilty pleas but not plea bargains, then you think the introduction of certainty in the sentence makes it somehow worse. That's hard to justify.
I reiterate that the focus on the "plea bargain" part of this whole thing seems misplaced. If anything, it's the part that makes sense; the problem is the high penalties and bad-faith charges, which is what should be penalized.
>if an innocent person has a 20% chance of being convicted, but the offered plea bargain is 1 year and the maximum sentence is 10 years, innocent people will do better by pleading guilty. The "10 years" is a problem, but it's a consequence of wanting to drive plea bargains.
>(The fundamental problem in this case is the 20% chance,
That sounds more like tilting against the windmill of "variance in extreme events". We also have the problem that there's a 1% chance of being in a car accident with tens of thousands of dollars in costs. In most cases, we shrug and say "insure it" -- i.e. trade a small probability of extreme loss for a guaranteed smaller one. Why do we see it as suddenly a problem when people do the same thing in the justice system?
Every legit example of it being a catastrophe turns out to draw its entire badness from some other already-bad part of the justice system, not the plea bargaining.
Horrifying. Ok. So slavery is back in the game. Hey, sign this and if you don't meet the requirements you are a slave -- you are "waiving that right". I am sure you are trolling.... right?
I think a good system would be to offer plea-bargains but only at a set percentage reduction of the original sentence, and only if the suspect isn't under some other form of pressure from the police. That would still encourage people who know the police have a very solid case against them to take the bargain, but not do much to encourage people who think they have a real shot at winning a trial by jury.
You mean if there was a fine of $1 per domain (per year?) as opposed to possible felony under CFAA to scrape public documents on the Internet? I don't want to get into moral nihilism or whatever we call it but what is a crime? Why are some acts criminal? What makes them different from a civil suit between two parties?
Sorry if I sound insane. I may be but the cause is just. Help abolish the CFAA https://www.eff.org/issues/cfaa