Let's say you are wrongly charged with a crime and the evidence is enough that the prosecution is moving forward. The max sentence is 30 years, and you're offered a plea of 2 years.
There is a chance the system will utterly fail you, and a chance that the system will correctly find you innocent.
You don't know those odds. You only know your fears. And the prosecution has a LOT of tools to raise those fears. Society has given you LOTS of reasons to trust those fears. But one thing you won't have is security that your innocence means you will not be found guilty.
2 years is a major problem, but...marriages have survived that. You'll be around to see your kids/nieces/nephews hit most of their major life milestones, and more importantly, a lot of day-to-day normality of what you call life.
30 years...your life has ended. Every relationship is over, every daily experience, everything you define as you.
You have a LOT on the line, and the system...enh, it has very little on the line. What odds of failure of the system do you find worth the risk?
If anyone takes a plea deal when they are innocent, they may very well be saving themselves some real pain. Or they may be needlessly damning themselves to life as a (ex)con. We don't know. But that it seems a viable option EVEN WHEN INNOCENT is definitely a problem. Making the system more reliable should definitely happen, but that won't remove the imbalance of incentives.
What it does do is reduce the sentences for wrongly convicted innocents to ones that are reasonable for the crimes that they supposedly committed.
If a guilty person who pleads guilty gets two years for a particular crime, why should an innocent person wrongly convicted get twenty years for the same supposed crime?
But that is how the plea system operates. That is why the sentences are so long.
If the maximum penalty approximated what people are actually sentenced to, the prosecutor would have less leverage in plea bargaining and a much higher percentage of people would go to trial. Or the pleas would have to be more generous which would under-punish actually-guilty people who take the plea -- and reintroduce the incentive for innocent people to plead guilty.
The only way to get rid of that incentive is to get rid of plea bargaining. (Which would then allow maximum sentences to be much lower.)
Sure, if the plea system disappeared tomorrow, then initially sentences would probably be universally high. But at least wrongly convicted innocents wouldn't be treated more harshly than the guilty.
In time, different (probably mainly political) forces would bring down sentences to what society considers acceptable (two years in our example). Even if sentences didn't go down, at least they'd be aligned with society accepts for both guilty and wrongly convicted innocents. In any case, the absolute length of sentences is outside the scope of my argument.
Objecting to one criminal justice reform because it might exacerbate how the criminal justice system is also completely unfair in another, equally terrible way isn't very convincing, when you could actually be advocating to eliminate both problems.
And hey, no more innocent people railroaded into guilty pleas like they are under the current system. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/why-innocent-peo...
Quite the opposite (in terms of pleas and cash bail). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bail and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargain.
For example in England plea bargains are based on timing of plea only and are limited to one third off the sentence only. Bail is given by default and a cash bond is not required.
> Which country would you say does it right?
I'm not sure I'm qualified to say that some country does it right, but England for example is quite the opposite of the US in terms of "presumption of innocence" really having a meaning. The system hasn't ground to a halt, yet innocent people don't rot in jail awaiting trial just because they're poor, and don't have to plead guilty for fear of getting a 10x sentence.
The rest of your post just goes back to my previous comment about max sentences. If we reduce the max sentence for that hypothetical crime from 20 years to 3 years, then our system would be the same in that people who plead guilty would receive two thirds the sentence that those found guilty at trial.
Also, one of the reasons that the UK is able to handle this increased case workload (although a majority of cases are still plead down) is they spend a relatively high amount per capita when compared with other countries. Once again, I am not against a holistic change that reforms the whole justice system. But doing away with the plea system doesn't have the benefits that you suggest and has various downsides that you are skipping over.
I mean, I'm sure at the moment of death risk the ultimate FOMO kicks in, but in the abstract? The rest of my life in prison sounds a lot worse when it's a long life rather than a still-long-to-experience-but-overall-short one. Always felt like a terrible motivation tactic.
Yes, it does.
You seem to only be considering the effect of your option to enter a plea bargain, and not other people’s option to do so, and the incentives that may create for them when the government has decided to target you.
No, it's not. The status quo practice of plea deals not only encourages false guilty pleas, it also encourages false testimony that confirms prosecution narratives against other people who do not plea guilty, because the extent and effect of cooperation with prosecution is often a factor in getting a plea deal and the sentence received in it.
(Now, it probably does more to encourage true guilty pleas and true incriminating testimony, and so in net probably makes justice more accurate than would otherwise be the case; but it toys the balance in favor of the prosecution for both the innocent and the guilty to do that, which can be seen as violating the principle that protecting against wrongful convictions is off greater priority than assuring the guilty are convicted.)
But innocent party A can't choose not to have a third-party B take a plea deal in which testimony that reinforces the prosecution of A is rewarded with a lighter sentence for B than a guilty plea without such testimony would get.
The existence of plea bargains does not make you more likely to get convicted of a crime you didn't commit if you are pleading innocent.