I don’t understand why you say that. Basically the prosecution has a lock on evidence that makes them think they can comfortably convict. They offer the defendant a standard plea to 2.
The issue typically isn’t innocence (they’re guilty), it’s an issue of how the defendant handles his guiltiness.
If there is a lack of evidence or a strong alibi, then typically the DA won’t threaten a trial — they will drop it or offer a lesser crime (depends on the context).
DAs don’t make a career of threatening trials for cases that aren’t locks. They want high conviction rates.
The intuitive concept of justice that the average person has involves a couple things.
- You need to be proven guilty even if you are, in fact, guilty.
- You should be punished for your crimes, not for "how you handle your guiltiness", not for going to trial, not for other things but for your crimes.
Certainly, most people going into the criminal justice system are guilty, there's little doubt about the circumstances and Perry Mason-style trials seldom if ever occur. But so what. That doesn't change the points above imo.
The most horrendous thing is that even when you are talking about guilty people, those who just knuckle under to the system can wind-up with minimal punishment and those who resist get punished more for this than for their crimes. Tell me again why this is just and reasonable.
> You should be punished for your crimes, not for "how you handle your guiltiness", not for going to trial, not for other things but for your crimes.
The way my friend explains it is that many people -- DA, judge, and defense attorney (my friend) -- try to make it so obvious that a plea is in their best interest. It would defy logic not to take it.
Again, the way he explains it, some of these folks are extremely unintelligent. They lack critical thinking skills. They don't trust anyone in a suit or with an education. Trying to explain how good a deal is can apparently be very difficult. As such, the big sentence isn't actually one anyone wants to give unless the defendant basically gives the middle finger to the system.
Some hedges:
- I'm not talking about marginal edge cases or cases where there is substantial doubt about what happened -- those tend to be much more subtle on all sides.
- I'm not talking about cooked up charges. Some DAs may threaten a case for a big charge, but they will plea down to whatever the evidence will make obvious.
- I'm not talking about smart criminals. There are not a small number of them. They typically take the plea if they are guilty.
- I'm not talking about rigged systems (they exist). The victims in those systems are fucked no matter what.
If you believe what you say, then talk to your local, state, and federal representatives and ask them to fund the legal system better. This will alleviate the clogged dockets and will (theoretically) discourage excessively punitive sentences for someone who wants a trial in their slam dunk case. I get the sense that some folks here on HN seem to think that trying a case comes at no expense, and that's simply not the case -- there needs to be some efficiency and some encouragement to be efficient when the outcome is obvious.
Look, I totally agree that a lot of the legal system can be incredibly unfair. That doesn't mean that incentivizing reasonable behavior by various actors in the system is wrong.
> Tell me again why this is just and reasonable.
Another way to say this is why can a criminal whose guilt is not in doubt by any party delay justice for someone else later in the queue just because he wants to make a scene in court.
Please go have a coffee with a public defense lawyer and talk to him/her about how efficient or inefficient the plea/trail sentences are. Other than in corrupt systems, all the ones I have spoken to think it's fairly reasonable (not the laws necessarily, but the sentencing).
Given the justification for plea deals is the crowded dockets, alternatively, you could talk to your representatives to reform the laws so fewer acts are crimes that get people arrested in the first place.
Also alternatively, instead of using life-ruining threats to 'incentivize' defendants, the only actors in the system being strong-armed here, into 'reasonable' capitulations to do whatever the prosecutor wants, you incentivize prosecutors to better behavior by abolishing plea deals so they have to focus finite resources on prosecuting only the most important cases against the most dangerous individuals, and not to add as many people as possible to the USA's disproportionately massive prison population. [0]
Also also alternatively, instead of fretting about a zero-sum game where defendants suffer from 'delayed justice' due to other defendants enjoying their right to a day in court, you could try to eliminate cash bail and let people back into the community until they've actually been convicted of a crime, so they don't have to await their trial from a jail cell. [1]
And being stubborn, illogical, mistrusting, or giving an abstract concept the metaphorical middle finger is one of the weakest possible reasons to punish someone with excessive jail time that you actually know they don't deserve, in an unaccountably secretive, opaque legal game of chicken where you're trying to make the defendant blink first.
Look, I totally agree that a lot of the legal system can be incredibly unfair. That doesn't mean that incentivizing reasonable behavior by various actors in the system is wrong.
Disagree. I would say that when the present overall law enforcement system is mockery of justice, then the grease used to speed the wheels of this machine is inherently despicable. I'm moderately familiar with the system, I know this keeps the whole process humming along. But smooth functioning can't really be evoked to defend keeping this beast on it's present track.
My friend has no issues trying the case — he’s good, and he gets paid for it.
It’s typically the judge with an overflowing docket and the understaffed DA that prefer the plea.
From everything I have personally witnessed regarding this matter, none of it is a god complex on any side (some DAs can be d-bags, but most of them aren’t) — it’s more of an issue of logistics.
Which deprives the public of a trial. If someone is going to prison, everybody has a right to know the circumstances leading up to it -- and both sides of it, not just the prosecutor's version which the defendant is coerced to sign onto. Convictions without trials aren't an efficiency, they're the suppression of the truth.
> The issue typically isn’t innocence (they’re guilty), it’s an issue of how the defendant handles his guiltiness.
That isn't how overcharging works.
There are a lot of very broad crimes that everybody commits all the time and hardly anyone gets charged with.
So when a prosecutor decides they don't like you, and there is a 50% chance they can prove the thing they claim you did, they offer you the plea. If you want your day in court (because you didn't do that thing), they also tack on seven more charges which everybody is guilty of, so that you're found guilty of something even if they can't actually prove the thing that caused them to notice you to begin with.
They may also charge you with something else they only have a 5% chance of proving but which carries extremely severe penalties. Which, even if they can't prove it, subtracts 5% times a massive penalty from the expected value of demanding your day in court.
> If there is a lack of evidence or a strong alibi, then typically the DA won’t threaten a trial — they will drop it or offer a lesser crime (depends on the context).
That happens after plea bargaining. And that's the problem. If they say "agree to six months or go to trial" then you have to take the six months or prepare for trial, which may cost a quarter of a million dollars or more and untold hours of your own labor. Then, after you've paid the time and money to prepare your defense, they drop the charges, leaving you with the bill.
Or drop all of the serious charges they could never prove but which you had to prepare to defend against in case they tried to.
It can be cheaper for an innocent person to spend the six months in prison.
1). Under USA jurisprudence, LEO's and prosecutor's are allowed to lie to the defendants. In other jurisprudence regimes, that is such a no-no that cases have been dismissed when evidence of such behaviour has been found and this is irrespective of any possible guilt on the part of a defendant.
2). As mentioned by others here, the fundamental rule of jurisprudence is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, which by it nature requires a jury trial.
3). Typical practice under USA Jurisprudence for prosecutor's and LEO's is that it is preferable to get a plea bargain than actually do the hard yards to find the actual perpetrator of some crime and then collect enough actual valid evidence to demonstrate that the person is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
4). Both state and federal agreements (business and otherwise) requires keeping all those "wonderful" private prisons full. This is to ensure that both state and federal entities get the best deal for the money that are paying out for these privately run prisons.
5). As intimated by others here, there has been extensive analysis of both state and federal laws that basically show that every person in the USA has broken at least one of the many tens of thousands of laws on the books that come with felony penalties. The vast majority of these laws are not even know by the vast majority of the population of citizens.
Have you ever been on a jury that has to consider the facts about a matter of any serious crime? It is a sombre responsibility and takes a great deal of effort to unemotionally consider the facts as presented. It is a not a duty that I wish to repeat.
Irrelevant. We're concerned here about the edge cases.
Yes, sure, there's a lot of obviously guilty people that get charged for the obviously illegal and obviously immoral thing they obviously did, and then they get the obvious punishment, fine, great.
> DAs don’t make a career of threatening trials for cases that aren’t locks.
That's not remotely the same thing as "no DAs ever threaten trials for cases that aren't locks". That does happen, all the time, and to the people who get caught up in it, the fact that the DA doing it isn't making a career of it is cold comfort.
It also doesn't consider a wide number of other structural issues involved with prosecutor discretion, or with the systemic imbalances in the system, as discussed in, eg, the linked article.
Until you are judged guilty by a jury of your peers or (at your option) the judge/magistrate/etc. after having had your day and chance to fairly air your side, it shouldn’t matter two flying fcks what the prosecution thinks. Innocent until proven* guilty.
Innocent until proven guilty is supposed to be the fundamental value of our justice system, this is the core issue I personally take with plea deals.