I guess so, but it doesn’t mean it is in the national interest.
This is yet another data point for the U.S. world-high incarceration rate. Her likely actual time to be served (85 percent of her 135 month sentence) is within the range of what is commonly given a murderer in Europe. And the other convicted Theranos executive is set to serve even longer.
I tried googling what the trial penalty was here (difference between 135 months and the declined plea bargain most likely alternative). It seems that no one is saying, but it must be substantial. She gambled with a jury and lost. I don’t think a country with a fair system of justice would penalize you for exercising the right to go to trial.
The same system is of course applied to impoverished defendants. Just because she’s rich doesn’t make it acceptable. If I was the president, I would ask the pardon attorney’s office to search out cases where there was a trial penalty and substitute the likely sentence length had there been a plea bargain. Yes, I know, I’d then be a one-termer.
Then everyone would go for a trial because why the hell not, especially the wealthy who can afford infinite counsel, and the courts would be clogged up.
Deterrence is certainly in the national interest, but you do have a point about whether the kinds of exceptionally long sentences the US courts love to hand out are more effective than more moderate ones as is typical of most other industrialized democracies, which also tend to have a greater focus on rehabilitation rather than retribution, and sometimes better law enforcement. But Holmes definitely deserves to be put away for years because of the severity and betrayal of trust inherent in this fraud.
She wasn’t “penalized” for the right to a trial. She was presumably offered a light penalty in order to secure a conviction and avoid the time and resources inherent in a trial. Why would anyone ever accept a plea bargain if the offered penalty is the same as what they’d get if they were found guilty at trial?
If the sentences were comparable to plea bargain results, there would be compensating major savings on incarceration.
66 percent of federal defendants have a public defender (82 percent at state level). If it is in the defendant’s interest to go to trial, their job is to try the case. If more defenders need to be hired, there are underemployed lawyers out there.
A lot of defendants would still plead guilty because of remorse and/or being told by their attorney that the government case was very strong. But suppose the net cost of having a good fair justice system is higher than what we have today? Is that a good excuse for doing nothing?
As noted by another poster, the most important consideration here (and in general, for a variety of crimes) is neither of those goals, but rather separation from society.
Not that people haven’t successfully engaged in scams from prison, but it’s commonly tougher than if you were on the outside.
I’m really having trouble following your logic. Given a choice between a plea bargain offer of 5 years, or a trial where if found guilty you’d get 5 years, or if found innocent you’d get 0 years… Nobody in their right mind, strong case or not, remorse or not would choose to take a guarantee of 5 years in prison rather than a possibility, however remote, of 0 years.
It just makes no sense at all.
Let’s put it this way. I make you an offer. I will give you 5 dollars RIGHT NOW. Or alternatively, I will flip a coin; Heads you get 5 dollars and tails you get 10 dollars. What kind of an idiot would take the first option?
Looking at old law review articles, from back when plea bargaining wasn’t so universal in the U.S., one answer was middle class defendants who didn’t want to bankrupt their families with the cost of going to trial. This was be another form of trial penalty, but it only applied to a minority of defendants. You can’t fix the whole system at once.
As for what kind of idiot, with a public defender, would plead guilty, there were many who did, and a lot who didn’t. One can speculate that criminals, not being held in jail, sometimes look on trial prep as work and/or have a feeling of hopelessness.
Germany has both shorter sentences and little plea bargaining. Should they be advised to adopt draconian U.S. sentences for defendants who won’t plead guilty? It would save on courthouse space.
If that seems often true, it’s probably only because so many of the super-wealthy deserve a reckoning. But certainly not all, by any means. I never had any issues with Steve Jobs, for instance, even though I disagreed with many of his product policies. What I think is much more common and more disappointing is the way that newly successful entrepreneurs, especially those who achieve great success at a young age, become darlings of the fatuously adoring and wholly uncritical financial media. The worshipful cover of Inc magazine posted above was from October, 2015. The previous year Forbes had named her the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire – she was 30 years old at the time and worth around $4.5 billion (Forbes now estimates her net worth at $0). That same year she was also on the cover of Fortune which ran a similarly gushy article.
It reminds me a bit of a satirical story written many years ago by the humourist Stephen Leacock called “The Wizard of Finance”, from a collection called Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich about the silliness of the wealthy classes in his era of the early 1900s. The protagonist in this particular story is a simple honest fellow who suddenly becomes very rich when large amounts of gold are supposedly discovered on his property. Quickly tiring of pretentious living in swank hotels into which circumstances had forced him, he tries to shed his wealth by buying terrible stocks, hoping to lose everything. But such is his fame and reputation among the wealthy classes that as soon as word gets out that “Tomlinson interests” are buying up a certain stock, everyone rushes to get in on the action, and he gets even wealthier, and naturally his reputation as a “wizard of finance” grows and grows, with everyone admiring his genius.
Eventually it turns out that the putative gold find was a scam perpetrated by someone else, and our hero’s paper wealth is wiped out. Whereupon the buzz among the wealthy classes is all about how they knew all along that the man couldn’t be trusted, and how they’d recognized his scheming shifty eyes right from the start.
If you think about it, our hero-worship of the super-rich is much the same today as it was over 100 years ago. Holmes got the adulation, and Elon Musk is still getting it, even though he obviously doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing at Twitter.
I’m not familiar with the justice system in Germany, but shorter sentences (than the US) is pretty much the norm throughout the civilized world, with a greater emphasis on rehabilitation. This is very much the case in Canada, for instance, but plea bargaining is very common and a very important component of the judicial process.
Setting aside the practical issues that others have pointed out, I don’t see why this is true in a fair system of justice even in principle. If someone is innocent, they will likely go to trial, and we aim for justice through having fair trials that should acquit them. Placing the burden of proof on the prosecution with a high hurdle for certainty is absolutely necessary to protect the innocent, but it inevitably means that when evidence is insufficient some guilty people go free. So what is wrong with giving a guilty person a strong incentive to come clean? Why is it “fair” to give a guilty person a free option to continue to lie and try to get away with their crime? Providing an incentive to encourage guilty people to not exploit the fact that the system is designed to protect the innocent is desirable for justice. Furthermore, honestly acknowledging your guilt is surely an important part of eventual rehabilitation and should be rewarded from the outset.
The plea bargain incentive given Ms. Holmes, to give up her right to a trial in return for a predictably shorter sentence, was identical regardless of her guilt or innocence.
I hesitate to say this first, because it’s a pure matter of opinion, but a coerced acknowledgment and an honest acknowledgement are close to opposites.
We don’t know what was offerred Ms. Holmes. But we do know that almost all other federal defendants cop a plea on advice of counsel. If an innocent parent, with young children, is told by their attorney that there is a sky high federal conviction rate, which there is, and that they have a choice between a probable eighteen months in prison and ten years, except that they have to prevaricate about their guilt to spend most of their child’s childhood with the child, what will they choose? Me, my family comes before my civic duty to respect a bad system of justice. I’d choose to lie.
There is a high federal conviction rate, but do you have any evidence that this is because the feds convict a lot of innocent people? Or is it because they only prosecute when they are very sure of guilt?
You are basically suggesting that trials are unfair. Doing away with heavily discounted plea bargains does nothing to make trials fairer. If trials are unfair, the correct solution is the direct one - to make trials fair. How do we do that?
You protect innocent people at trial by placing a stronger burden of proof on the prosecution, and setting a higher bar of certainty. But the higher this bar, the more guilty people will inevitably go free. Ultimately, you will always be balancing the false negatives (guilty people going free) against the false positives (innocent people convicted).
I would argue that a system of heavily discounted plea bargains actually allows us to provide more protection to innocent people while not allowing so many guilty people to go completely free that the harm outweighs the good. We can set a very high burden of proof at trial to protect the innocent, while incentivizing the guilty not to try to take advantage of the way trials are designed to try to get away with their crime completely scot free.
They may be psychological opposites, true. But how do you distinguish between “reward” and “coercion”? I would say that if you are giving someone a benefit for doing the right thing (a guilty person pleading guilty), that’s a reward. I would only call it “coercion” if you are wrongly forcing an innocent person to plead guilty.
I may have been a bit misleading there. There is a very high federal guilty plea rate, I suspect because of the trial penalty. But the federal conviction rate, for those like Holmes who risk trial, isn’t as high:
As for only prosecuting when they are sure of guilt, I believe that. I also believe that smart decent prosecutors make mistakes. The is part of why there is, or was, a right to a fair trial.
Sure, and the purpose of fair trials is to free innocent people, not to give guilty people a free shot at getting away with it when the evidence isn’t watertight.
Follow through my argument above. I think that offering discounted plea bargains helps innocent people. It allows us to make trials fairer to protect the innocent by raising the standard for certainty of proof at trial, while providing a strong incentive for guilty people not to try to exploit this and get away completely free.
I think the principal problem lies not with the plea bargains, it’s with the fact that wealthier people are privileged by being able to afford to go to trial with much better chances of acquittal whether they are guilty or innocent. Holmes was in a massively privileged position with the respect to the legal system. There is no injustice in her living with the consequences of her choices. She is guilty, she could have acknowledged her guilt and got a lighter sentence without trial, she chose instead to gamble on trying to deceive jurors and she failed.
You are seeing the trial sentence as extra punishment for choosing to go to trial. It is not, it is the fitting punishment for someone who is guilty but refuses to acknowledge their guilt. The plea bargain sentence is a discount offered to guilty people who are remorseful and beginning the rehabilitation process by acknowledging their guilt.
I dunno, my experience with the legal system is limited, and a lot of it comes from serving on a grand jury investigating allegations of police corruption (spoiler alert, we heard a lot of confessions of police corruption) but my sense is that plea bargains are used to coerce the innocent into confessing. I certainly saw a case of that.
Now, all those dirty cops who confessed were also motivated by plea bargains, and I’m quite certain they were guilty. (They weren’t just admitting to guilt, they offered detailed stories of how they and others were corrupt, and in some cases agreed to wear wires to document corruption as it happened.) But… I had the sense that some of the most corrupt cops were getting off with lower penalties and their dumber and sometime less-corrupt brethren were being slapped with much longer jail terms.
I left that experience with a profound distrust of plea bargains and an outright hatred for civil forfeiture laws.
And that’s bullshit. At least it was for the cops i saw testifying. They weren’t remorseful. They were just acting strategically, in their best interests.
No doubt, by the time they got to sentencing, they gave a nice sob story about feeling remorseful. But they sure as hell didn’t look or sound remorseful talking to us. They were doing it to reduce their sentence, and that’s all.