http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
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.
Is part of the plea bargain deal not discussing your innocence? In other words, how do we know whether people taking plea bargains are innocent?
In this case it sounds like the prosecutor was going for 70x the plea offer before the plea was even rejected. Simply outrageous.
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?
Not a good idea. Well connected people will get off lightly.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Any system that results in accepted guilty pleas for such cases is broken and evil, and should be destroyed.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064673
Mainly linking because I took two other stabs at ways to address the prosecutorial issues 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.