Waive your fourth amendment rights. If a policeman wants to search you or your home, you can either let him, or force him to come back with a warrant. But if they need to get a warrant, and discover you had done something wrong, you're in for a heavier penalty.
Waive your fifth amendment rights. You have the right to remain silent. But not answering questions will get you a heavier penalty if you are found guilty.
Waive your sixth amendment rights. We already waive the right to a fair trial. Why not waive the right to counsel? If you lawyer up, you're obviously trying to obstruct justice. If you're found guilty, that's a heavier penalty.
Of course, most of those are horrible ideas. They may make it easier to lock people up, but it also makes it easier for the police and prosecution to do a shoddy job and still get convictions.
I do not, however, think retaining counsel will engender the ire of the police or the prosecution. If it would have any effect, I think it would be in the fact that one the whole 99.9%+ of non-lawyers would make terrible defense counsel and the prosecution would get away with things a barred attorney would be objecting to (within reason from the judge, of course).
The real question becomes how do you propose fixing the cons that arise from this obvious benefit?
It's a silly question, so I'll give a silly answer.
Suppose we have a man who, from the ages of 30 to 60, is likely to kill a person each year with probability 1/$age. Now suppose he's on trial for murder (a crime he is guilty of) and there's a 99% chance he spends life in prison and a 1% chance he spends no time in prison due to a mistrial. The overall probability he will kill again is ~ 0.7%
Suppose instead that we put him in jail for 10 years with 100% probability (ie, a deal that a logical actor would take facing life in prison with 99% probability) and each year he spends in jail his desire to kill decreases by a factor of 2. Now his overall probability of killing again is ~ 0.04%.
So the killer's situation has improved and society's situation has improved.
</silly answer>
Say you have 10 people who have committed a crime and under the current system 9 get convicted and go to jail for 10 years and and 1 gets off on a technicality. So, there's collectively 90 years of prison time being served.
Now imagine we introduce plea bargaining and offer 5 years to all those accused and all 10 take it. The conviction rate goes up, but the total amount of jail time being served is drastically down.
Now I don't know what kind of "discounts" plea deals usually offer, or what it increase the conviction rate to, but I doubt it's an "obvious" win if you're counting by the number of years convicted offenders are removed from society.
Reading your silly answer, I think you're arguing something even less "obvious", which is that willingness to commit a crime is a direct function of age. And if that's the case, and if we're measuring benefit by a decrease in one's willingness to commit a crime, well then your system makes sense because any jail time is essentially better than none because the majority of the decrease in willingness to commit a crime happens at the front end of the sentence anyways. But I think that requires a broad assumption about the correlation of age and crime.
It took a lot of work to find a possible candidate for an obvious benefit. Yet, given the recent utilitarian turn of your comments, I doubt that a Hobbesian analysis was the basis for the claim.
obviously. but you have to actually show that the possibility of a "plea bargain" trades one-for-one (or anything unreasonable) for your argument to be convincing.
That moral stance accepts the possibility of human error to a degree which makes it impossible to meet the standard you propose.
No, actually. The primary purpose of the law is to maintain order. Protection of the innocent is a highly desirable feature, but if too many of the guilty are released people look to their friends and family to deal with transgressors.
The reason we don't do that is because we as a society have largely agreed that the innocent should be protected. That is the purpose of our system.
As I said, the basic purpose of the law is to provide order.
The recognized importance of the protection of innocents is the demarcation line between a system that maintains order, and a system that maintains order in a civilized fashion.
North Korea is one hell of an orderly country. As they embrace generational punishment, they have zero respect for the protection of the innocents. The extent to which other non-extreme examples are more civilized is the extent to which they respect the importance of protecting the innocents more than North Korea does.
Not particularly. As I pointed out, protection of the innocent is a highly desirable feature of a legal system. But to say that "Law is there to protect the innocent first, if not, then it has no purpose" is just wrong.
In common law "guilty man" has already been convicted. It is the accused who plea bargain.
[/IANAL]
But I will take a bite at your idealism and for the sake of conversation presume you are speaking of morality and forgo debating whether there is a persistent nexus between one's legal and moral responsibilities - the heart of the Swartz tragedy.
When our guilty man bargains in his interest, it is an individual choice. When the government presses for plea bargains in order to reduce the number cases which go to trial, it is a matter of policy - a policy based upon facts unrelated to the guilt or innocence of the guilty man. The policy treats the morally innocent and morally guilty identically. This should give us pause.
Our very notions of moral justice require its agents to treat the morally innocent and the morally guilty differently. An agent who treats the morally innocent and morally guilty identically cannot be dispensing moral justice. As such an agent, the government is neither moral nor immoral. It is amoral. The facts of the case cease to matter. Convictions justify the means of coercion.
I am willing to accept that some may see this as an "obvious benefit" - e.g. Thomas Hobbes accepted the amoral government as the least worse among the alternatives and with such a sovereign, the morally guilty man bargaining for a lesser sentence is always just:
"A Mans Covenant Not To Defend Himselfe, Is Voyd."
For Morall Philosophy is nothing else but the Science of what is Good, and Evill, in the conversation, and Society of mankind. Good, and Evill, are names that signifie our Appetites, and Aversions; which in different tempers, customes, and doctrines of men, are different...
Society is actively harmed when innocent men accept plea bargains and admit (falsely) to committing a crime. People lose their faith that the justice system actually protects them when their friends are all imprisoned despite having done nothing wrong. Take, for example, the widespread fear among the police of a public with lots of cameras -- it's not that the majority of cops are worried about their corruption being caught on camera (most cops are not corrupt), it's that they fear that a recording of their actions will be edited to make it appear that they were corrupt. Only someone who has lost their faith in the criminal justice system would engage in such an act, and such people have lost their faith because they keep seeing people go to prison without receiving a trial, regardless of guilt of innocence.