Land without Plea Bargaining: How the Germans Do It (1979)

Things like the Chipshol debacle in the Netherlands shows that there is strong evidence of judicial collusion in a series of court cases - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipshol has a very superficial summary of something that I found quite shocking, involving public accusations of corruption, perjury, where one of the ex-judges involved was forced out as head of the Dutch anti-trust authority when it all blew open.

Judges and lawyers seem to come from the same social circles, have gone to the same universities, members of the same clubs and so on. To access the conveyor-belt of promotions and opportunities, it is not inconceivable that a culture of "scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours" in a part of a small legal and judicial community in a small country could form.

A system in which lay-people are involved may have to work a lot harder to pretend that biased judgements are fair.

The Mollath case is contested. It may very well be possible that he is guilty, but not crazy or crazy, but not guilty. The problems found in this case are very symptomatic of the bavaria/baden-württemberg courts. One reason is that the appeals court for that region is unlikely to actually accept an appeal.

Evidence?

We hear about cases where the prosecutors decided that someone was bad and proceeded. However it would "violate our privacy" for us even to be TOLD how many of us are under surveillance.

Our general awareness of how often it is misused is not evidence that it is not misused on a regular basis. And in general the best presumption is that anywhere where you have authority combined with dark spaces, there are cockroaches breeding.

Plea bargaining does happen in the UK and can be problematic in those cases but it's nowhere near as excessive as in the US.

And with sentencing guidelines published for all common offences the prosecutor is not able to threaten you with massive sentences because you (or your lawyer) can know what the likely outcome is. For a first time offender the odds of jail for almost any offence is low.

The quality of legal representation provided, especially in trials facing major jail time is significantly better. For a big case you will have a Queens Council barrister defending you who is just as experienced as the prosecutor.

And finally the Crown Prosecution Service is far less interested in the sentence than it is in the successful outcome. In other words their statistics look just as good if you plead to one very minor charge compared to several major ones. So plea bargaining here is much more about reducing their workload than it is in scoring political points.

If you are truly innocent (or believe yourself to be in the case of Aaron) then trusting then plea bargains are not for you in the UK.

I am not sure you read the same paper as anyone else. Nowhere did I see this. In fact, the author more or less said the exact opposite on page 215. Also, this paper is dated 1979.

Plea negotiation, let alone plea bargaining, is rare in the UK. The UK government only in the last decade began to accept the use of plea bargaining in corporate crime. Occassionally, plea negotiation can also occur, most commonly in co-conspirator cases like gang assaults, but again this is uncommon.

To compare the absolutely routine use of plea bargaining in the US to their rarity in the UK would be well beyond a stretch.

Also, I think English law can in theory draw on precedents set by courts in other commonwealth countries; I vaguely remember seeing Australian case-law cited when I was studying law related to professional negligence, but I can't find a reference to it now.

It's a very typically British setup which is the culmination of 100's of years of compromises here and there which viewed together now are totally impenetrable to the layman. The whole setup is utterly confusing and should be thrown away and rewritten from scratch preferably with the same law applying over the whole of the EU if you ask me, but then I'm not a lawyer.

Cites a New York Times article.

> Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.

Perhaps it was originally incidental, but at this late date both prosecutors and defense attorneys know on which side their bread is buttered. They might occasionally countenance a reduction in sentences, but they'll never allow a reduction in complexity and complication to emerge from our legislatures. Our judges all begin as prosecutors [!] so even though their livelihood wouldn't be threatened they're too professionally deformed to even recognize complexity as an issue.