This NYTimes article examined how our justice system is dependent on plea-bargaining, and raises the speculation of what would happen if a large percentage of defendants insisted on their right to trial.
Seriously, what would happen? Would the government scale back on possession charges? Have “drumhead” courts, or outright abolish the right to trial? What?
Most defendants agree to a plea bargain because they figure it’s offering a better result than they’ll get from a trial. So any attempt to bring down the system is going to have to find a bunch of volunteers who are willing to go to trial and accept harsher sentences. I doubt the number of people like that will be enough to overwhelm the courts.
They’d increase what is common now already, keep the person in jail awaiting trial until they decide to release them for time served. There certainly would be a decrease in following through on nuisance charges like drug possession, and there would be a increase in inflated charging to get defendents to plead out. There would also be an increase in maximum sentencing to punish those who insist on going to trial.
The first few dozen would get harsh sentences and people would quickly lose their enthusiasm for the plan.
What a Cloward-Piven idea!
Question is whether they would lose enthusiasm quickly enough to keep the courts and the prisons from being overwhelmed.
One or both of two things would happen. Trials would take longer and longer to happen, while meanwhile defendants would continue to have to come to court, comply with pretrial bond conditions, or sit in jail (if they didn’t make bail); or prosecutors would have to make better and better offers (up to and including outright dismissals) in order to clear their dockets.
A third possibility would be for taxpayers to pay for a justice system that’s capable of delivering the right to a trial that’s guaranteed by the US constitution.
But that’s not going to happen.
All it would take is for everyone currently under indictment to demand their Constitutional right to a speedy jury trial. “Speedy” is the key – it’s functionally impossible for the system to provide a fair trial for all of them within 45 days. Some will get sentenced, yes – but the majority would be dismissed without prejudice due to lack of court space and time. (Even more time would be lost on the ad hoc panels to decide which cases actually move forward.)
No volunteers necessary.
The prison-industrial complex would force lawmakers to hire more judges.
What about juries? We’d probably run out of eligible jurists before we run out of criminals. Even today, if you know the evidence against you is weak, a winning strategy can be to insist on a trial ASAP – though I wouldn’t recommend it without a good lawyer!
Here’s an example from the venerable TV series, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
I once read a similar suggestion that said if college students had really wanted to stop the Vietnam War, an effective strategy might have been to stop resisting the draft. The idea was that if college students and their peers were getting routinely drafted and sent off to Vietnam, it would bring the war home to their parents. And the parents of these kids were more influential than the parents of the kids who weren’t able to avoid getting drafted and actually were sent off to fight. If the sons of the upper classes were dying in Vietnam, the upper classes would oppose the war.
They can demand it. But will they get it? The rules on what constitutes a speedy trial are relatively vague. And a key factor is that the state is generally only held accountable for delays it’s responsible for. If the defendants are collectively trying to causes delays by overloading the court system, they shouldn’t count on receiving a favorable decision when they turn around and claim they’re entitled to release because of those delays.
The right to a speedy trial applies to prosecutors, not to judges. In other words, if your case doesn’t get reached because there are 27 other cases ahead of you, your right to a speedy trial won’t help you. Or rather, it won’t help you so long as the prosecutor is, (or says she is) ready for trial. If the judge decides to try one of the other 27 cases, you just have come back on another day. Anyway, there is no general 45 day rule. I’m not sure where you got that from. Maybe it’s particular to your state. As a constitutional matter, it’s decided on a case by case basis, and the Supreme Court has said that years long delays are ok.
This is a really bad idea. The prosecution always has the information edge by dint of the fact that they’ve been investigating the case longer.
The long-term problem would be that jails and prisons cannot accommodate the numbers of prisoners that the court system currently generates even with plea bargains. So if there were even the slightest upset in the process, there wouldn’t be sufficient secure holding space for the additional defendants incarcerated.
While this may take as long as a year to manifest itself nationwide, it would quickly become noticeable in the major cities as the overtime hours allotted for jail staff simply to control the prisoners as well the skyrocketing medical costs would become burdensome within weeks or a few months.
Fortunately, most criminals are impatient, immature and frankly somewhat stupid. If they didn’t receive near immediate gratification, their willingness to undertake any such plan would be quickly extinguished.
We don’t have plea bargains in England because they encourage the authorities to bully people into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit. There’s just a flat third sentencing discount for pleading guilty.
It’s the same here in the U.S.A. (the “encouraging” part, that is) – except, the public doesn’t care who does time for the crime, whether it’s robbery or drug abuse. As long as everyone can rest in their comfy beds believing the illusion of elected politicians being “tough on crime”, the Great Lie will go on and on forever.
How is that any different from a plea bargain?
A defendant has no way of knowing how much greater a sentence he might be looking at if he rejects a plea offer (other than the statutory maximum, of course.)
Is that not also true in England? Unless they have fixed sentences for each crime, the defendant would know, at the time they chose to plead guilty, only that they were getting a 33% reduction, but not what the base sentence was, right?