A Tiny Bank’s Surreal Trip Through a Fraud Prosecution

Re:A Tiny Bank’s Surreal Trip Through a Fraud Prosecution by FireBeyond on Monday July 27, 2015 @06:22PM (#9958395)

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?'.

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Re:A Tiny Bank’s Surreal Trip Through a Fraud Prosecution by shasta on Monday July 27, 2015 @07:00PM (#9958550)

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.

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Re:A Tiny Bank’s Surreal Trip Through a Fraud Prosecution by hga on Monday July 27, 2015 @06:52PM (#9958521)

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.

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