Plea bargaining seem to me to be a very unjust component of our judicial system. Consider and extreme case where a defendant is charged with capital murder. He is offered an “opportunity” to plead guilty and escape the death penelty. Otherwise he must stand trial and risk being found guilty and sentenced to death. Suppose you are that defendant. Suppose you didn’t commit the crime,but there is circumsantial evidence which the prosecution can use to make a plausible case against you. Suppose further that the crime was sensational and the papers are screaming for blood and the DA is up for reelection. What do you do?
And what about the corruption which exists due to the infamous “prisoners dilemma?”
I think that the practice should be outlawed. If the state has evidence against a defendant, it should charge the defendant and present it’s case to the jury and let the chips fall. If the case is weak, then the defendant should go free. No deals.
One of the reasons we have the plea bargain system is because of the tax dollars it saves the public. If every case that were bargained had to be put through the courts (and those cases subject to mistrials, retrials, and appeals) we would incur far greater costs. The thinking is that the benefit of easing the burden on the courts outweighs the cost to society in having these criminals on the street sooner.
Also, plea bargains supposedly offer the state a chance to convict more criminals than they otherwise would, the argument being that a guilty man may cop a plea in cases where the state’s evidence might not be strong enough to convict.
Sometimes a plea bargain is also done because the prosecutions case isn't so good. So they simply plea bargain in order to convict the person of something.
What's more of a problem in the US justice system is exchanging information for a lighter sentence. It is illegal to give someone something of value in exchange for testimony. I believe the Supreme Court of the US is suppose to be dealing with that issue sometime in the near future.
In his book, Guilty, the Collapse of Criminal Justice (an excellent read, by the way) Judge Harold Rothwax, a long-time criminal court judge in New York City, tells the story of what happened when he was a young prosecutor.
The presiding judge told him that there was to be no plea barganing in his court. Rothwax replied to him “If so, there will be no justice.” And right he was. With no plea bargaining, each case went to trial. Soon the courts were too hopelessly backlogged.
If you want to outlaw plea barganing, then you must expand the current system. A lot. And there is no indication that we, as a society, are willing to do this. If you don’t expand the criminal justice system, the court cases will back up and soon criminals will start to go free because they are denied their right to a “speedy trial.”
If the defendant in the original post is offered a plea and rejects it, he’s in exactly the same situation he would be in if the plea was never offered - he goes to trial and takes his chances.If there’s circumstantial evidence ( which is often more reliable than eyewitness testimony) and the public is screaming for blood,and the DA is up for re-election, the state is not going to drop the case.In fact, I’d bet in that situation, he wouldn’t even be offered the plea.