How about for those factually innocent of the charges they face? There should not be a perverse incentive to "plead guilty (to something you did not do), or risk (even with your cap) twice the sentence if you exercise your rights. In this case, it is bad enough to be sentenced to _x_ for a crime you did not commit, and insult to injury to be sentenced to _2x_, let alone _20x_ for having the gall and audacity to demand a trial.

Lesser, but still valid issues may remain when you are indeed guilty, but feel that plea bargaining or sentencing recommendations are out of proportion, unrealistic or whatever. "Hey, contest it. If you lose, you suffer. If you win you suffer, 'less'."

Meanwhile the burden of "expensive" trials, lets be honest, falls largely on the accused, not the state, who has (for all intents and purposes) and unlimited budget (especially at the federal level) - while not strictly accurate, I realize, if there's enough determination, you will suffer that - how often does the government dismiss cases because they are "too expensive to prosecute"? Compare and contrast to the myriad of people who have no option but public defenders.

> How about for those factually innocent of the charges they face?

For them, I'm ok leaving the punishment at _1x_. :)

You're not being realistic. Structuring the court system so that the most expensive option to the public is also the option with best expected outcome for the one selecting options is obviously inefficient. And an inefficient justice system is a bad justice system. Many of the problems with the justice system today stem from lack of funding and you're just proposing to make the situation much worse.

No, there's a middle ground. We are also removing people of their liberty. The wholesale use of plea deals (which elsewhere in the world are not allowed, or massively limited) is driven by multiple, flawed priorities:

1) the re-election of DAs and / or prosecutors, and;

2) the desire to minimize the cost of prosecuting cases, with a lack of acknowledgement of the massive disparity in power and little to no concern for those steamrolled in the name of such efficiencies.

Many of today's problems with the justice system do indeed stem from funding issues, but rarely on the prosecutorial side. Instead you have overworked, underpaid public defenders who may many times only meet their clients just before opening statements, even on more complex trials.

Leaving aside the question of zealotry in things like The Innocence Project, many of these cases have issues related to defense ineptitude, not (just) prosecutorial misconduct or misguidance. And by ineptitude, I don't mean active or otherwise incompetence (though there are certainly instances of this), but instead, details and problems that slipped through the cracks because a defendants counsel was too unfamiliar, too overworked to be able to provide the best or necessary defense. Tales abound of missed submission dates, witnesses not interviewed or called, and the like.

If there's funding issues to be found, it's this, rather than 'how do we make the prosecution's life easier/better?'.

My proposal of a 2:1 cap on sought sentence to plea sentence makes the prosecution's life harder, not easier. I think I was pretty clear that I find the present situation with 20:1 ratios wrong.

But I'm troubled by the apparent consensus here that offering plea deals violates a defendant's rights. I find that thinking in terms of rights isn't even helpful. Think in terms of outcomes.

You seem to believe that a bigger portion of the pie should be shifted to public defenders from prosecutors. Fine, I'm not arguing that you're wrong, but the money comes from the same pot. Having an incentive to spare the public the cost of a trial when the defendant acknowledges his own guilt is common sense.

There's also just way too much crime for our English common law based system to handle properly, with a jury trial and all. Without going back to original details like executing those convicted of real felonies, which we're too soft to do as of now, not to mention our police/judicial complex is simply not that trustworthy, the current plea bargaining system is probably the best we can do.

And there's the minor detail that US crime has dropped dramatically from its recent peak; per the thesis of Arrest Proof Yourself, without a steady diet of "the clueless" being run through the system on petty crimes at worst, many police units and courthouses would have to lay off people, and that wouldn't do.

>"You're not being realistic. Structuring the court system so that the most expensive option to the public is also the option with best expected outcome for the one selecting options is obviously inefficient. And an inefficient justice system is a bad justice system."

You have to define what you mean by efficiency before you can declare that one system is more efficient than another. I agree that the post you are replying to proposed an expensive system, but it may be more efficient if your efficiency metric takes time spent by innocent people in jail into account as a cost.

If your metric is time spent in jail by innocent people, then the optimum is obvious: don't prosecute anyone.

That's absolutist, too. If we define a goal of 'zero jailed innocent people', even accepting it as a goal we can likely only ever asymptotically approach, then it shows an impedance mismatch between how to attain this, and the motivations of prosecutors which are not the same, but rather typically, 'show a high and increasing rate of convictions to show a toughness of crime'.

This is not to say that all prosecutors are railroading sociopaths, of course not. But there is a valid question in the sense of "should a prosecutors role be to a) see the guilty punished, or b) to see the most convictions?".

I don't disagree with any of this. My objection with this entire subthread has been the assertion that plea deals violate rights. I find that crazy. When presented with the facts of a case, a good prosecutor and defense attorney will be able to reasonably assess probabilities for the possible verdicts. Hammering out a plea that's around the average outcome can be beneficial to everyone.

I think there should be some onus on the prosecution to show (beyond grand jury levels) some more grounds that they'd reasonably win a case before being allowed to offer a plea deal.

Obviously there's a threshold - how do you do so without a 'mini trial' of sorts (which I get is part of the purpose of the grand jury)? And where the plea deal is initiated by the defendant, then this is waived.

I'm not outright against plea deals. But I do think they are massively overused here in the US, and there needs to be some safeguards that you're not shoehorning someone into something, just to get anything.

> how often does the government dismiss cases because they are "too expensive to prosecute"?

Arguably that is what happened to banks that are "too big to jail" (with expenses to both the government and society at large). This does not make the situation seem any better or fairer.

>Why is it so terrible to be punished for exercising your right

Because rights shouldn't come with punishments for using them. This would be like the government being outright allowed to buy the votes from people by means of tax relief if they don't vote (which equates to a tax on those who do vote). Or imagine if the government instituted a tax of $300 per month for having any medium able to communicate (phone, computer with internet access, etc.) but then gave an equal amount tax relief to anyone who agreed to not communicate about certain topics. This would equate a tax on those forms of speech.

I think this point of view is unrealistic and harmful. Look at what happens when you get a speeding ticket. In theory, you have a "right to a trial". But, of course, we can't afford to have everyone who gets a speeding ticket contesting it at trial. That would be prohibitively expensive. So instead, the courts impose hidden costs, making it a pain in the ass to go to trial over a speeding ticket. At best, you win a pyrrhic victory.

I would greatly prefer an honest accounting of my actual rights and the costs associated to using them. I think we would have much better justice system if less lip service was paid to "rights" and more attention was paid to costs and outcomes.

The US Sixth amendment:

"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, [...]"

So if everyone started demanding trials for speeding tickets, they would probably just switch them to civil offenses instead of criminal ones, where they already aren't.

>I think we would have much better justice system if less lip service was paid to "rights"

The only solution is for actual service was provided to rights. Anything else is unethical and will justify and necessitate extreme violence to overthrow.

By the time you've said "Why is it so terrible to be punished for exercising your right" I would hope the answer would already be apparent. Being punished for exercising your rights is the opposite of having those rights.

I realize that phrasing is getting me down voted. If I'd phrased it as "Why is it so terrible to be rewarded for not exercising your right", I probably wouldn't be getting down voted. But really, what's the difference?

Indeed, what is the difference? It's just phrasing. So if you can see why it's bad to be punished for exercising your rights, surely you can see why it's bad to be rewarded not to.

I think I've been fairly clear that I find both acceptable. Thinking in terms of "rights" instead of costs and outcomes just increases the chances of a bad decision.

Would it be accurate then to say that you don't believe people should have the right to a fair trial?

You couldn't possibly have thought this was going to be a helpful comment to anyone when you posted it.

You seem quite to have, across multiple posts, pushed for the notion that rights get in the way and that our rules should be based on outcomes. Thus it seems natural to suspect that those views also include (be they your own views or be they a set of views for which you are playing devil's advocate) that there isn't a right to fair trial or that even if there is such a right, it should be ignored in favor of better outcomes. (We haven't gotten to the point of deciding what actually counts as outcomes, but it appears that up to now one outcome is low costs, and having unfair trials is a great way to get really low costs).

All decisions should be based on comparing outcomes. Cost is important, but obviously that's only one small part of the outcome. Letting the guilty free is an undesirable outcome (assuming a just law), and jailing the innocent is a terrible outcome. I find the framework of "rights" unhelpful for balancing pros and cons, but the phrasing of the previous post was a very poor paraphrase of that position.

Cost cannot be important. Else those who are costlier to go after are weighted as less important to pursue unless drastic measures are taken to balance out the cost. Someone rich enough to hire a team of lawyers who slow down the process in every legal way possible should not be let off just because they have the money to spend to do such.

And as to the 'framework of rights', this isn't merely a framework by which one operates a legal system but the very foundation of one. If we drop the notion of rights (and the less mentioned but just as important duties) we end up with no system at all.

If we do not have rights (nor duties) then what point is there to a system to is there to ensure my rights are respected (by both the system and by others) and that I perform the duties required of me? We have to start over to ask why we even need a legal system to begin with. It quickly ends up being 'because the guys with guns say so' and any distinction between government and organized crime quickly dissolves.

Consider a simple case of theft. I take your money. Why is this wrong? Because you have a right to do with your money? But we have tossed out rights.

Now if instead you don't mean to toss out all rights, but to eliminate a few that you consider unproductive to our legal system functioning, it is thus quite a fair question to ask which rights are you in favor of tossing. Such as the right to a fair trial. If you want the prosecutor to be able to cheaply lock up guilty people, you can toss the right to a fair trial and then define guilty based off of being declared such. Ergo everyone convicted is guilty and convictions are quite cheap. Even cheaper if we toss the right to counsel. No innocent people locked up and you can put someone in prison in under an hour. Just go up to the jury and say 'we have proof did X, Y, Z', offer up some fabricated evidence, and then offer the jury a forged signed statement from the defendant saying they did it. No cross examination, no actual defense, no need for honesty because the rights to all that has been tossed. And no innocent people are locked up because they are by definition not innocent.

Without the framework of rights, there are cons to balance.

> Consider a simple case of theft... Why is this wrong?

Theft is illegal. Wrong is a different topic.

> any distinction between government and organized crime quickly dissolves.

The difference between organized crime and government has nothing to do with rights. Think about the range of governments that exist.

> If you want the prosecutor to be able to cheaply lock up guilty people, ...

I haven't spelled it out, but the goal of the legal system is to separate the guilty from the innocent. Percentage of innocent punished, percentage of guilty freed, and cost are all factors for evaluating how well the system works.

Rights are a foundation for a legal system in the same way that religion is a foundation for a system of morality. That is, lots of people use them/it as a foundation, but that's neither necessary nor ideal.

How so? From what you've said, not only does that seem to be what you think, but you seem to have no trouble with the idea. Am I wrong?

See my sister post. My apologize if you honestly thought that was a useful post. I would certainly not characterize my position as not being in favor of fair trials. But phrasing it terms of rights I do find unhelpful. Doesn't an innocent person have a right not to be jailed? But what's the point of even phrasing it that way?

The point of phrasing things in terms of rights is to set goals for ourselves. We believe that innocent people have the right not to be jailed. Sometimes they are anyway. But not jailing innocent people is one of our goals. Similarly, people don't always get a fair trial, but when we say that we believe people have the right to a fair trial, that means that our goal is for every accused person to have one if they want it.

So, here is my reasoning: you say that you think it's a good idea to punish people for getting a fair trial. If you punish people for something, then it's inherently not a right, because if it's a right then the goal is for everyone to have one if they want it. Thus, you think that people should not have the right to a fair trial.

Note that I asked for clarification rather than just stating that this was your position, because I wasn't sure. So your upset response does not make sense to me.

Further, I don't understand why you find that phrasing to be distasteful, since you seem to be against the notion of phrasing things in terms of "rights" anyway. If you think "rights" are not a useful concept here, why is it wrong to say that you don't believe people should have the right to a fair trial?

I don't think that "rights" is the best framework for evaluating alternative systems. I still understand what you mean when you use the word, though, and obviously I do think the accused should receive fair trials.

The accused don't receive fair trials when they take a plea deal, though. You seem to think that plea deals are a good thing, so did you perhaps mean to say that you think the accused should receive fair trials if they want them? And even then, what if they want them, but they don't want them badly enough to risk the additional punishment you think they ought to receive for getting one?