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.