The courts would immediately be clogged and prosecutors would be forced to drop many charges because they wouldn't be able to have a trial within the mandated 70 days.
Prosecutors would be forced to choose the cases that they actually believed important as opposed to the current as-many-charges-and-cases-as-they-can.
Lawyers are required by professional ethics (and possibly by law in some places) to present plea deals to their clients. Having it be otherwise would be problematic.
However, in practice, most defendants take the advice of their lawyers. If public defenders advised not to take a deal, they probably wouldn't take them.
This is definitely the weak point of this plan, I admit.
It's literally the prisoner's dilemma. You have to have all the lawyers and all the clients act in concert. But if someone defects, they get the plea deal (better than getting stuck in jail and going to trial) and the others get screwed.
I would truly like to see prosecutors have to take all cases to trial.
The flagrant disregard for prosecutorial ethics is just appalling.
It's probably unconstitutional for them to refuse plea deals en masse if it creates a massive violation of one's right to a speedy trial.
If the government wants to bring in more judges and prosecutors, that's its perogative.
Land of the free indeed. SMH.
But that purely linguistic analysis only tells you that "speedy trial" has no objective meaning, which can't be the intent of the phrase. The right to a "speedy trial" was supposed to ensure that trials occur speedily relative to some context which is now lost.
However, it's somewhat ambiguous. The principle of lenity is supposed to interpret ambiguity in favor of the defendant... it rarely happens.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/speedy
The entire gloss is "marked by swiftness of motion or action. Also: prompt sense 2".
Prompt 2 is "performed readily or immediately". We can reasonably interpret "immediately" as "without delay", but we then run into the problem that that is explicitly one of two options.
I guess I'm not addressing them.
I guess in this case there would be a massive pressure put on the probation office. However they may just not assign officers.
Sometimes 60 days is too fast for the lawyers so the defense and prosecution might request a continuance to test evidence, find witnesses, etc.
I don't think probation officers are really the bottle neck. Judge availability would be the main point of pain. The vast majority of cases end in a plea deal without a trial. This already involves layers, prosecutors, probation officers, etc. But it doesn't usually involve a judge, except maybe for approval. But that's still at lot less time than a trial would be.
[1]"New York top court clears man held six years at Rikers Island without trial" https://cn.reuters.com/article/instant-article/idUSKCN1FZ2YZ
[2]"Browder tragically ended his life in 2015 after suffering beatings, two years of solitary confinement, and egregious conditions during the three years he was incarcerated on Rikers Island—all because of a baseless accusation that he stole a backpack. " https://www.nyclu.org/en/news/new-york-may-finally-do-someth...
Every time they go to court, they waive their right to a speedy trial until the next time they're in court. If they didn't, the judge would set a trial date for within a short period of time (less than 70 days).
In practice, defendants will waive dates to fit into the judge's calendar.
Over and over the prosecution was not ready and over and over the judge allowed it.
But in some jurisdictions, there are so many defendants that they don't have enough courtrooms to run trials 24/7 to get them done in 70 days.
That said, even this would probably be an improvement, since plea bargains are an almost uniquely American horror.
If you can spend years held before trial that’s all still cold comfort
Nearly member of the defense bar (led by the public defenders, but including private counsel) convinced their clients to refuse to waive the rights to a speedy trial. SB and Riverside ran out of courtrooms to hold trials in by 10a that Monday, and were forced to ask LA and OC county for help. By that Wednesday, the backlog grew so large that defendants' cases were being dropped because the constitutional deadline for bringing their case to trial had passed.
The following week, both DAs gave in completely.
https://www.courts.ca.gov/partners/documents/Crush_of_Cases_...
However, the experiences of the defense bar during that time did inspire the subsequent events to which I was referring, which was in late 2009 or early 2010.
It's hard to find articles about it online since it was an esoteric maneuver that AFAIK was only covered by local (now defunct) papers.
And we need to do away with most law enforcement discretion (this includes DAs). Enforcement is extremely uneven. If the law using going to be enforced in many situations, then why enforce it at all?
This brings up another point. Is this a justice system? How can it be when the cost to defend one's self in court (with or without a lawyer) is more expensive than the fine. You can be punished more defending yourself as an innocent person than as a guilty one who pleads guilty.
The two structural changes that I would make are:
1) Any monetary collection by the "justice system" goes to a victim or into a fund which gets redistributed to the general public at the end of the year.
No more funding things with fines (aka regressive tax on the poor). You want funding--it comes out of taxes, period. This stops a lot of the perverse incentives in the system.
Marijuana legalization is mostly held up because the fines from it fund the "justice system".
2) Prosecutors may not offer plea deals.
As we have seen time and again, this devolves into abuse of office. Prosecutors offer deals with far fewer consequences to rich, non-minority defendants.
I would actually go one further:
3) Prosecutors don't get any ability to pick the jury.
The court should be able to strike people for various bias reasons. The defense should be able to strike people with some limitations.
The prosecution should have to make the case with the jury provided by the court system and the defense. Prosecutors already have far too many advantages when conducting a trial (too many jurors are "He's in the chair--he's guilty."). If they can't make a criminal conviction with those, then they shouldn't be prosecuting it in the first place.
Also look into private prisons and Unicor. Essentially slave labor for GSA. Truly horrible conditions. There is not one semblance of rehabilitation in the US prison system.
Why is this downvoted? I've witnessed it. How else would you describe a trooper and ADA knew that a charge was incorrect and still let it stand, including pretrial restrictions only under the incorrect charge.
What you’re suggesting is a total breakdown in societal norms bec you see a problem and don’t understand the root cause so you just want to treat one symptom. Why not take some time to understand the root cause instead, and come up with a solution that doesn’t have immediately worse outcomes for literally all of the rest of society.
As then the prosecution has no reason to grant any leniency, so whichever clients they tried would receive far longer sentences.
Sacrificing some clients to get others off does not seem permissible.
I believe they are also required to present the deal to their clients.
Additionally, judges would know what was going on and presumably take it under consideration.
It's an interesting open question whether judges should be elected or not (though I lean toward no due to the lack of visibility of their actions)... but what isn't up for debate is how corrupt the US election system is - as long as campaign finance is broken we can't expect the judiciary to fix things for us.
Because it exposes their individual clients to greater risk?
If we want to see change in the justice system we need wider societal education and to force that change from the outside, but that butts up against a lot of "hard on crime" rhetoric.
How can a public defender ethically represent a client when they have so little time to prepare for a case? If you have 30 cases at a time and minutes to spend with your client how can you do your job to the standard deserved by a defendant?
If the above isn't too difficult, then suspending plea deals shouldn't be much of a stretch?
For others, you can always request a continuance and make sure you put on the record that the current timeline will force you to be ineffective.
If your client were unaware of the strategy, would it be unethical to tell them?
So therefore it's unethical for a prosecutor to accept a plea deal less than all charges.
"In the interest of Justice" is a pretty thin excuse.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/criminal_justice/standard...
They just have to not waive that right and the trial must proceed within 70 days or so.
If public defenders are waiving that right without informed consent, then people need to file complaints with the bar