There are a large number of people who take a plea just because they can't afford the bail and it would take a year or two to get to trial. Or because lawyers are expensive and it's cheaper to plead guilty than to defend your innocence.

I've recently had an issue with an incompetent trooper (1 successful complaint and one pending) and incompetent magistrate (complaint pending). It will cost between $100 (win) and $650 (lose) to go through the legal process and defend our innocence. It's been more than 6 months too. All this is over "leash law" violation. But it's great to see both the trooper and magistrate commit civil rights violations, and have the civil rights lawyer tell you that they are violations but that the system doesn't care unless you suffer serious financial damages. So much for a justice system.

I once had a cop issue me a moving violation for Jay walking. So I understand that there can be pettiness from certain cops.

But that's a far cry from a cop being violent against someone or killing someone wrongfully. The justice system also acknowledges it cannot right every wrong, but hopefully when there's a major wrong it should be able to right it every time.

I don't believe there's any room for misconduct or gross incompetence. It's one thing to not be able to fix every wrong, it's another when the system itself creates those wrongs.

If you have a trooper lying to a judge or continuing to hold a charge against you they know is false, they should be fired.

If a magistrate doesn't know the basics of the law (like due process and dismissing with prejudice), then how can they be qualified to rule on it?

Some judges are elected; they could easily be grossly unqualified.

Not only are magistrates elected in my state, but they aren't required to have a law degree nor pass the bar. They take a short training course and test. In this case the original magistrate was arrested for gambling with campaign money, perjury, etc. The second magistrate was a retired cop and former police chief. Needless to say he was hostile to the defense the entire time while not questioning anything the trooper said, even stuff that was blatantly false.

Just because it is a far cry from direct violence or murder doesn't mean that it shouldn't be taken care of. You can harass folks with "minor" civil rights violations and make life hell for someone. I'd argue that being lenient on "minor" civil rights makes the violent ones more likely because of the lenience towards other ones.

If you want to be in law enforcement, don't commit civil rights violations. Period. You might not be able to right every wrong, but once a wrong comes to light, you can very well do something about it.

This claim disregards those who take a plea deal because they believe they cannot win a federal criminal case, which is a superset of those who are actually innocent of their accused crimes.

Yeah. Oddly enough, the aforementioned “97%” stat brought me to an Innocence Project page[1] which leads with:

> In nearly 11% of the nation’s 349 DNA exoneration cases, innocent people entered guilty pleas.

Obviously a small and biased sample group, but guilty plea ≠ guilty.

[1] https://innocenceproject.org/guilty-plea-campaign-announceme... (2017)