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.
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.
- 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.
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).
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.
[0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018.html
[1] https://reason.com/blog/2018/01/25/government-is-gutting-the...
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.
2 years for the crime, 18 for pissising off your friend. Does your friend think he is a God of some sort?
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.
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.
By definitiion, they're not, until proven.
So you get an 18-year "fuck you" for invoking your Sixth Amendment right to a trial by an impartial jury of your peers?
Look, I'm not a lawyer. You may want to go talk to one -- especially a public defense lawyer. Your eyes will be open about how fantastically reasonable the system usually (intentional hedge word -- not all DAs or judges are reasonable, but most are) is.
It quite literally creates career criminals out of non-criminals, since, once they have a crime on their record, virtually all avenues of employment are closed off to them besides violent/property crime.
The current estimate is roughly 1%.
Sending someone to prison is basically taking some or all of their life. We currently have an estimated 20,000 innocent people in jail. That's not rare, and it's disgusting that this complete ethical failure of the American justice system is defended here.
Even if this concept is defensible (which is arguable), something like 1 year extra is plenty of excess punishment compared to the cost of a trial.
The real issue is the huge number of charges prosecutors can bring, charge stacking, and the rules for how aggregating factors can increase penalties. That's how a prosecutor can tip the scales so egregiously. The fix is that we need less harsh penalties and rules against charge stacking. To prevent an overcorrection we need to make sure that police departments and prosecutors enforce the [less harsh] penalties more consistently.
Penalties are so harsh today that police and prosecutors don't even care about misdemeanor convictions. If there's no potential for a felony charge the police will literally walk away. Similarly, prosecutors don't want to waste time on penny-ante misdemeanor and felony cases and will let defendants off with a minimum penalty. That creates a self-fulling prophecy that without harsh sentences criminals get off scot free. It's why California is suffering from a property crime wave--police and prosecutors are habituated to ignoring property crimes now that the penalties are less severe, which means there's no deterrence. We could have deterrence without harsher penalties if they actually did their jobs.
There are a lot of issues involved, and contrition (or lack thereof) is one of them.
Most of the judges prefer pleas for obviously guilty people since they clog the docket. Going to trial just because you can even though your case is a slam dunk guilty verdict is an abuse of privelege, imho.
If a case is not a slam dunk, the judges often don’t give the max out of spite — it all depends on the details of the case.
If you have some free time, go watch a few criminal court trials. Some of these things will make of scratch your head and wonder why the person didn’t plea (e.g., clear cctv footage of the crime being committed with multiple eyewitnesses who corroborate).
As I said elsewhere, if you don't like the system, please call your local, state, and federal representatives and request that they support more funding for the judiciary.
Every case going to trial would cost an incredibly unreal amount of money -- there needs to be some streamlining somewhere, and the question is where and how.
There are other ways of avoiding the trial than threatening the accused. Also there are countries that don't seem to have this problem. Perhaps a look outside the US might suggest some alternative ways of behaving that might be used.
If I am actually innocent, there are most likely three scenarios:
1. The DA drops the charges. This is a very common outcome when the case is not a slam dunk.
2. I was a witness to the crime and/or I was in the vicinity of the crime, and for some reason I was not willing to mention this to the DA. This happens a fair bit (esp. the vicinity one), but this is not a "slam dunk guilty" case, and every lawyer will tell you this. My guess is that I would talk to the DA via my lawyer, because I aggressively avoid hanging around places that are likely to have crime (even the white collar variety), and I have nothing to hide.
3. I was framed. This is tricky. My reaction would depend on the context, but again, I keep a healthy distance from people who regularly and knowingly commit crimes.
It seems like a lot of people think that DAs just sit around looking for fake charges to drop on innocent people. This simply does not happen as much as some commenters seem to think it does. Does it happen? Sure. Is this something I ever worry about? No, never.
Do you know of any/many completely innocent people who were wrongly jailed?
The worst I know of is a guy who was trafficking 9,000 pounds of marijuana and got fingered for the whole thing rather than charged as one of three. His issue? He didn't sing and the others did. He got what many would call an unreasonably long sentence given the circumstances (iirc, he did 2 years). Note that a crime had actually been committed (and he admitted to it, at least to friends), so it's not like he was innocent.
https://www.innocenceproject.org/
With the note that that is the tip of the proverbial iceberg but if that doesn't convince you that you are flat-out wrong I don't know what will.
As I have said elsewhere, when the facts are not as clear, the plea offers tend to contrast less starkly with a court sentence as well.
You seem to think that there are a lot of cases where the DA is just making up charges against a totally innocent person. That just happens very rarely. There are some weird domains like CPS/child abuse that have must-try cases for political reasons, but the various actors all know what's going on there and conduct themselves accordingly.
Look, IANAL. I am just telling you what my best friend has told me over the past two decades. If you want to learn more about this, go talk to a defense attorney and ask them their opinion on this matter. I think you will be (pleasantly?) surprised at how reasonable the system usually is.
If I were arrested and charged for a crime I did not do, having to choose between 6 months guilty (_and a felon for life_), or the chance of zero-or-20 years would be Very Difficult. On the one hand, I don't have the money to pay for a good attorney -- which means I'm more likely to lose, bankrupt my family, screw any chance of retirement, etc. On the other hand, pleading guilty to a crime which I know I am innocent of rankles me because of the injustice, but it also is the (game theory wise one) choice that gets me back to my family faster. (Of course then, being a felon, good luck getting a job, so my chances of a good life later are also totally messed up.)
You're looking at this from the perspective of someone who is guilty, and Might Get Away With it. Of course a plea makes sense there. Try looking at it from the perspective of someone falsely accused, though, whose option is either a public defender or being falsely convicted.
It takes some serious mental gymnastics (e.g., your doppelganger commits a crime right as you walk by) or you living in a massively corrupt area.
As far as money goes, you can get a publicly appointed attorney that the state pays for if you cannot afford an attorney on your own. Some of these folks are really good, some aren't. That said, if you're totally innocent, no lawyer who has passed the bar should have any trouble getting the charges dropped. Again, DAs don't just sit around trying to frame people for crimes they didn't commit -- they have enough actual work to do.
Es a "for example" I suggest that you read about Mike Nifong's (DA on the Duke LaCrosse rape case) actions and his despicable lying. [1]
This may seriously change your opinion on the subject.
DA's regularily lie and cheat for political gain.
What percentage of cases do you think are like this? My guess is sub 0.01% — it’s just not that common according to the defense attorneys I know. When it does happen, bar complaints fly. My friend tells me that there definitely are wrongful convictions, but it is often not that the person was innocent of a crime, but that they were convicted of the wrong charge. As far as I am concerned, these types of cases seem to be very much the exception rather than the rule — no system is perfect, and I am fully aware of that.
I have said elsewhere that a corrupt district or DA is a caveat to my stance. Ditto with high profile “must try” cases (I was a juror in one of those). That was a district with a corrupt DA — it happens. The cool thing to me is that the dude was disbarred — the system worked.
I will also add that I think universities interpret rules far too generously (more like guilty until proven innocent), and I don’t agree with that at all, but that does not always become a legal matter. When it does, it is often a must-case for political reasons, and plea deals getnwokky then. I’ve said all of this elsewhere.
Cuz the vast majority of these were not plea bargains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wrongful_convictions_i...
That's...amusing.
> Again, DAs don't just sit around trying to frame people for crimes they didn't commit
Mostly not, it's more likely to be child who conceive of the frame and manufacture evidence (both planting physical evidence and falsifying testimonial evidence.) Plenty of groups of cops have been found doing this, sometimes to cover premeditated police crimes, and sometimes to cover for police errors.
And sometimes the FBI simply invents entire fields of forensic science so that they can have “experts” testify in their (and state) trials to support the guilt of whomever law enforcement is directed at.
The idea that it is trivial for a minimally qualified lawyer to ensure that the factually innocent walk free in America is laughably naive.
Guess what, jury nullification is a thing. So even if they’re 110% guilty and the evidence is incontrovertible, the jury of their peers may judge that the law in question was unjust and the charge unfair and acquit them anyway.
They have the right. Period. No equivocation.
It's a right, not a privilege. There is a fundamental difference.
Economy of justice is an important consideration in the civil system but if there are too many criminal cases for courts to providing way the process to which there is a constitutional right, that's a problem of the legislative branch criminalizng too much conduct or underfunding courts or the executive branch engaging in overzealous prosecution. Rigorous questioning of criminal cases isn't just a right of the accused, it is the manner in which the public if assured that real crimes are being properly prosecuted rather than the government lazily scapegoating convenient, vulnerable targets while the real perpetrators go free.
All it will take is some LEO or prosecutor to decide to come after you and you will be facing the very thing that any others have faced.
Due process and a fair trial are rights, not privileges.
What privilege?
- It’s considered a 2-year crime.
- The 20 (that seemed high to him for a 2 year plea) is a fuck you for going to trial when you are almost undoubtedly guilty. As someone else mentioned, it seems to show a lack of remorse.
- Note that both sentences will probably have time off for good behavior as well as possible probation. This can make each of the sentences less daunting (e.g., “2 years” might end up as 6 months served and 1.5 years probation).
- Cooperating is a totally different issue. They use that to get a bigger fish (usually).