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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

The (even) bigger problem is that almost no one gets a jury trial these days.

From memory, 96% of cases are decided by plea bargaining.

98% of people currently incarcerated in the U.S. have not had a trial. In fact, around 25% of them haven't even been convicted of a crime as they're being held in pre-trial detention (usually a misnomer because, as mentioned, most of them will make a plea bargain before going to trial.)

This website has a really great visualisation of the U.S. prison population: https://mkorostoff.github.io/incarceration-in-real-numbers/

And see here for its sources: https://github.com/MKorostoff/incarceration-in-real-numbers/...

Think plea bargaining is just the US?

Where else is it used? In some countries it’s considered a human rights violation because of the asymmetry of power.

The site that I linked to in my other comment [0] claims that "No other country [than the USA] on earth incarcerates so many people without trial. While many countries around the world have rushed to adopt American style plea bargaining in recent years, not a single one uses it for such a large portion of cases."

If you follow the sources it takes you to this 80-page report, which I haven't read, but I assume the numbers are in there: https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/publications/the-disappe...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35814578

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