The vast majority of criminal cases end in plea bargains, a new report finds
npr.org
npr.org
1. Limiting the 'trial penalty' to 25% or so of the sentence 2. Banning pleas that involve dropping charges in exchange for pleading to others 3. Proper funding for public defenders
The first and second are to solve the problem that prosecutors overcharge and defence lawyers advise innocent clients to plead guilty rather than risk significant jail time fight bogus charges. This seems to be a common tactic by prosecutors in the US and it should simply be banned through these mechanisms.
Of course the other problem is that people can't defend themselves against bogus charges because the cost is ruinous, so proper funding for public defenders is important.
It’s harder to argue against “not bringing bullshit charges” even though in practice the outcome of your version would simply be the lawyers/prosecutors don’t bring bullshit, it’s the political downside that, I suspect, would doom it.
Not attacking or defending plea bargains, but it is only natural than an association of lawyers would prefer the lengthiest procedures that give the most billable work to lawyers.
I wish I could remember which book I read it in, but in one counties lawyers joined together and refused all plea bargains. It almost instantly collapsed the legal system in their county and caused a multi year backlog. Our legal system is no longer setup to provide all people the right to a fair trial, we simply don’t provide the resources for it anymore.
Recent crime surveys have shown that the majority of contested felony cases are never tried in open court, being settled instead by the striking of a “bargain” between the defendant and the prosecuting officer. Administrative discretion has thus largely supplanted judge and jury alike. The practice has been severely criticized by Professor Moley, who characterizes it as “ psychologically more akin to a game of poker than to a process of justice,” being “an attempt to get as much as possible from an unwilling giver” rather than “a search for truth.” In view of the technicalities and delay that were permitted to develop in connection with jury trials, the utilization of some such avenue of escape would seem to have been inevitable. The practice may be expected to develop still further unless judicial procedure is improved to a point where a trial becomes an efficient means of disposing of contested criminal cases.
In most jurisdictions, the only alternative to such a compromise agreement has been a jury trial. Trial by a judge alone, the right to a jury being waived, has been regarded as of doubtful constitutionality. Recent decisions of the federal Supreme Court and of the supreme court of Illinois, sustaining such non-jury trials even in the absence of statutory authorization, have gone far toward dispelling this doubt, and warrant an examination of the practical working of the waiver plan in those jurisdictions where it has been given a trial.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
Well that's simply untrue. Very often prosecutors will overcharge to force a plea deal on the defendant who doesn't want to risk it, and overwhelmed public defenders don't have the resources to properly examine the evidence or collect their own evidence in defence of their clients. And often it's a fraction of the sentence, not 75%, because charges are often dropped as part of the deal.
Would the justice system simply expand dramatically?
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Guess what, the vast majority of civil cases end in settlement as well.
For civil it’s largely because each side’s evidence must be disclosed to the other prior to trial. Therefore, the attorneys can pretty effectively estimate the probabilities and expected outcomes. Given these estimates, the two sides typically split the baby and settle somewhere in a reasonable range.
For criminal it’s because 99.9999% of the accused are guilty and everyone knows it. Juries don’t appreciate having a week or more of their lives wasted for some defense attorney to try to argue that the clear video of their client stealing the car isn’t them, or was a setup, or whatever.
Sensible criminals take whatever deal they can get rather than risking pissing off a jury.
>"In New York City, we've identified 716 individuals, 716 individuals, who are responsible for approximately 30 percent of the shooting incidents since 2021," NYPD Chief of Crime Control Strategies Michael Lipetri said.
>10 men have been arrested 485 times since the change in bail law.
Are you sure we're locking up too many people? Or is it that we live in a country with a lot of crime? I don't really know anymore.
Further, I think that extreme inequality breeds crime, especially violent crime. This is a country with the most extreme inequality in modern history.
One city having a bail problem does not invalidate the observation that the US has an abnormally large prison population for a developed country [1].
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/28/us/mass-incarceration-fiv...
It's definitely not that we currently live in a country with rampant criminality.
Adding onto that, Google says the NYPD budget is over 5 billion dollars a year. If there really are less than 1000 people responsible for so much violent crime, this seems like institutional ineptitude on a pretty staggering scale.
> If there really are less than 1000 people responsible for so much violent crime, this seems like institutional ineptitude on a pretty staggering scale.
They arrest them, but the state lets them out. A lot of state reps are openly against any form of prison/jail for criminals - this is what those policies produce.
I call bullshit. You've been watching too much right-wing propaganda. Name some of these reps.
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/manhattan-da-alvin-brag...
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-manhattan-da-alvin-b...
As a prosecutor, he also engaged in racially-motivated prosecution of a clear case of self-defense until public pressure forced him to back off.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/new-video-shows-girlfr...
NYC officials are pro-criminal, anti-everyday person.
40% up from pandemic lows sounds concerning, but we're still down near the bottom of a 30 year decline.
And from: https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/stats.htm, NYC had anywhere from 120,000 to nearly 300,000 arrests each year from 2012 to 2021. 10 people abusing bail reform? 716 shooters? These numbers are many orders of magnitude lower than the number of people affected by crime and the criminal justice system in New York every year.