I read the Granick piece. One thing that strikes me as completely absurd is that the plea deal is for a substantially lower sentence and that if the plea deal is rejected the prosecution will go for a much higher punishment, sometimes as much as 10 times as much as offered in the deal. It would seem to me that if you offer a guilty plea that is 10% of what you intend to seek that if such an offer is on the record that a small multiple of that (say twice as much) should become the new maximum sentence. It's utterly frivolous to mess around with 90% or more of a sentence just to put pressure on people, that's poker table tactics and we're dealing with people's lives here.
The most worrying bit is the part where she says that people will plead guilty to things they did not actually do just to not have the chance at a much worse sentence during a trial stacked against them. This is not about justice at all, it's just a numbers game.
For reference, here in the UK people (typically) get 33% off their sentence if they plead guilty. There was a push in 2011 to make it 50%, but that was rejected.
However the people being prosecuted don't know in advance what sentence they will receive exactly. Sentencing is carried out after the verdict (sometime quite a while after if "pre-sentence reports" need to be compiled). There are sentencing guidelines, so they have a reasonable idea or starting point, but there is much variation in these due to many different mitigation or aggravating factors.
Particularly at the "low" end, a person may not know whether they will be getting 33% off a community order or 33% off a jail sentence.
Still, there are very, very few occasions where it is reported that innocent people plead guilty due to the reduction in risk. That may also be due to the reasonable lengths of the starting sentences.
The majority that go through the courts, that is those who are actually guilty, plead guilty. They get a small "reward" for not tying up the courts unnecessarily.
My personal opinion is that in an ideal world we wouldn't offer any plea deals, but we don't live in that world. Yet.
No. It's not a deal thats "made" per-se, there are no conditions to be haggled over, its simply that Judges will automatically award the reduced penalty at the sentencing stage if the defendant pleads guilty.
> The prosecutor claimed to be planning to press for about 12-14x the plea offer.
Is that better? There comes a point where it doesn't make a difference anymore.
Ever see a sale like that? Where one day something costs 10 bucks and then the next day it's 170? Me neither. That's not a deal. It's blackmail. Do what we want or we'll do our best to destroy your whole life. Justice, eh?
We'll let you off the hook if you pay us $200 of the $2000 that you may or may not actually owe us. And just in case you've missed it, there are four snipers at the top of the roof. I don't know what they're doing there, but thought you might wanna know.
Never mind the nonlinear severity function of time in prison. Which gives me another idea - fungible jail time. I'd have spent a day in jail for Aaron.
Connected in what way? Bernie Madoff isn't going to find any friends to do time for him.
Monetary compensation though? That's a whole nother can of worms. Although I've got to wonder if the incentives are aligned such that it would encourage better prison conditions.
How about Al Capone. They had a hard enough time putting him away, if he could have mobsters rotate through jail to do time for him they would have never kept him behind bars.
hm. Well, if we allow a volunteer to stop volunteering at any point, this necessitates that the actual inmate remains in jail (concurrently) until the original sentence is completely fulfilled. So a 20 year gangbanger rap might turn into 4 5-year sentences. Or 20 1-year sentences. But the latter might be foolish, as the gang would lose power if most members were out of the game.
Just was trying to think of ways for 'social proof' that certain sentences were outrageous and ridiculous (beyond juries, since their "peer" requirement has been effectively destroyed in today's specialization-based society).
I've spent some time thinking about this myself, and about time vs money tradeoffs. Depends on what you think prison is for. If it's rehab, rehabbing a group of friends doesn't seem to work. If it's a safe place to keep bad people, you're not keeping them there. If it's about punishment, then maybe.
But prison sucks not just because you have to eat crappy food. It's because you have to eat crappy food everyday. If a rotating crew each serves one day, what's that? I can go a day without eating. This is a sum of the parts less than the whole situation. And the key is that people in jail aren't free to pick their schedule. You don't get to swap out with a buddy so you can attend your sister's wedding. If you're stuck in a shitty place unless you get someone to cover your shift, you're not in prison. You're working at walmart.
Incidentally, I've read that hiring prison doubles is a thing in China. It's illegal, so you're effectively under house arrest for the duration to avoid detection, but you're also not in prison. The guy you hired to show up and say your name is.
If a sentence is outrageous, you get a crowd of people to march around and protest until the governor or president grants a pardon. That's the existing process to deal with exceptional circumstances.
> rehabbing a group of friends doesn't seem to work
And if it were gangsters, it seems like it would have the opposite effect. Three square meals a day and some downtime to plan your next misdeed. And heck, the same goes for activists actually. So there would have to be no personal contact. Not that the US prison system is in any way about rehab.
> If it's a safe place to keep bad people, you're not keeping them there ... This is a sum of the parts less than the whole situation
Well presumably only other bad people sign up to help out bad people, and the idea would be that only with enough support, the sum of the parts would indeed be reduced. Trying to gauge my own utility function, it feels that sentences from between 3 months to 2 years would have corresponding increasing harshness on life-as-I-know-it. Under and it's a vacation, over and my present existence is basically completely gone. Of course those with a different uh, world view, would have a wildly different utility function.
OTOH this is clearly not a DIY avenue, and if that political will were actually available, instead of further codifying the prison industry why not just actually fix the damned legal system instead - vague laws, prosecutorial overreach, understandable due process, right to representation, broken sentencing, etc.
I really like your idea of "pricing" using multiples of the prison sentence if plea bargain isn't accepted. This forces market dynamics that the prosecution much consider. I don'w know if 2x, 1.5x or 3x is the right amount, but whatever the multiple, the prosecution knows that the accused is actually weighing the benefits based on the fact that they know they are innocent or guilty instead of treating their awareness of their own guilt as irrelevant, which is something a 10x multiple does.
At 10x, knowing that you are innocent is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand and it simply becomes a choice between the lesser of two evils, because a good is not a realistic option.
This. The law should be rewritten to prohibit prosecutors from entering into plea deals of less than X% of the maximum sentence they are prosecuting someone for, with the exception of plea/immunity deals that include providing incriminating evidence in another case or against another person. Not sure what X% should really be, but it should be sufficiently high as to prevent prosecutors from using the large delta between plea and conviction sentences as leverage. My initial thought would be 50%.
I think I got your point. I just approached the problem from the other side. I think limiting a prosecutor's ability to bargain would be easier from a legislative standpoint than getting involved in sentencing, and more effective since the sentence asked by the prosecution is really just a recommendation. Either way, the important part is ratio of sentence to plea bargain, if I understood you correctly.
Prosecutors will go for very low plea bargains if their case is shaky, with huge penalties for not accepting the plea, so many shaky cases never make it to trial. By reversing the situation you end up with half of the maximum rather than maybe 10% of it, in effect most plea offers would increase rather than stay at their current level and many more cases would have to be tried.
I think that the idea here is to prevent prosecutors from charging people when they only have a really shaky case then using the leverage of a small plea to force people into pleading guilty. If prosecutors don't want to lose cases, and they can't force people to accept really low pleas then they would have to stop trying to get people on really shaky cases.
Well that is the whole point - if the case is shaky (i.e., the accused is likely to be innocent), then the case should be either dropped or go to trial.
Any system that results in accepted guilty pleas for such cases is broken and evil, and should be destroyed.
There may be a problem, no matter which side you approach it from.
Suppose the prosecution makes an offer, they're willing to go lower, but only if they think the defense will accept. The defense then rejects the offer, perhaps with the implication they might accept a lower offer. If a lower offer is made, the defense can reject it but now they have less risk—since the offer was made the prosecution is bound to x% beyond that.
Some people might view that as gaming the system and I'm not sure it could be tuned to avoid that. On the other hand it might improve honesty on both sides of the table. The ratchet effect may keep the defense from being intimidated. The net effect should promote not guilty pleas among the innocent, but ideally it should not have that effect on the guilty.
The most worrying bit is the part where she says that people will plead guilty to things they did not actually do just to not have the chance at a much worse sentence during a trial stacked against them. This is not about justice at all, it's just a numbers game.