Re:Confessions of an Ex-Prosecutor (2016)
by AnthonyMouse on Monday July 23, 2018 @09:11PM
(#17597381)
> They offer the defendant a standard plea to 2.
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.
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.