Why are plea deals so good?

[Voyager]

@Procrustus

It really depends on the severity of the offense. If you’re talking Murder, most prosecutors aren’t gong to make you much of a deal. Maybe 35 years instead of 30, or whatever. Just enough that there would be some incentive to some people to plead guilty. If you think you have a good defense (“it wasn’t me,” or “I had a good excuse”) you’ll go to trial. If convicted you’ll serve, perhaps, a little longer than you would have if you had taken the deal. On the other hand, maybe the judge will say, "Sure, you’re guilty, but you sort of had a reason, I’ll give you the 25 years instead of the 30.

Scott Turow, who was on the Illinois committee studying the death penalty and which recommended its abolition, said that they found that the guilty in murder cases were more likely to take a plea than the innocent - and thus the innocent had an elevated risk of getting a death penalty, since prosecutors were more likely to try to make the case a capital one for leverage.

[Little_Nemo]

@Procrustus

In Washington State (the only state system I’m familiar with) the place you do your time is never part of the deal.

It isn’t in New York either. The judge sentences you to a period of imprisonment - but he cannot sentence you to a specific prison (either good or bad).

[Bridget_Burke]

@Urbanredneck

Cant a person also negotiate the prison they will serve in and their prison conditions?

Like wasnt Martha Stewart allowed to pick her own prison?

No. Stewart requested a facility that would make it easier for her mother (in her 90’s) to visit. She was refused & sent to a prison down south.

[Kent_Clark]

@Bridget_Burke

No. Stewart requested a facility that would make it easier for her mother (in her 90’s) to visit. She was refused & sent to a prison down south.

In Missouri it’s the Department of Corrections that assigns which prison you’ll go to. One of their criteria is accessibility to family members, but it isn’t a high priority.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@wolfman

As long as human jurors are involved there is no such thing as certain to win.

Or human judges, for that matter.

[llcoolbj77]

@Procrustus

In criminal cases, the vast majority of the time, it is not too difficult to get a conviction. The plea bargain happens not because conviction is uncertain, but because it is pretty predictable. The defendant knows he’s going down, and simple needs a little “incentive” to plead guilty instead of insist on a trial. The"deal," offered is more to save judicial and prosecutorial resources then because the government doesn’t think it can prove its case. The cases that make their way into the newspaper are newsworthy because they are the exception to this rule. If the government doesn’t think it can prove its case, the case can just be dismissed. I know several career prosecutors who have never lost a case at trial.

Bingo. On the other hand, I don’t know a single prosecutor who has not lost a case at trial. It happens. Juries are funny things.

[Habeed]

@Bricker

I’ll address that next, but first I want to be sure you’ve abandoned the “no evidence at all except Sneed’s testimony” claim. Have you?

I’m going to restate the inverse. Reasonable doubt means a reasonable explanation exists that explains all of the evidence where the defendant is not guilty of the crime charged. In this case, the hypothesis “he didn’t do it” is only directly challenged by “the guy who did it says he told him to”. The only “doubt” required for the defendant not to be guilty of the crime is “he lied to save his own life”. That doubt is reasonable.

No matter how you phrase it or what tricks you use, to prove he committed the crime for the purpose of a valid conviction so far as the actual laws of the land specify (yes, I’m implicitly saying the appeals courts fucked up) you must show it is unreasonable to doubt the testimony of one man who literally has a lethal injection needle to his hand.

I would say a written order for the murder, a large sum of money, sufficient to entice a murder, audio recordings, a confession, something like that is the minimum evidence needed to turn this reasonable doubt to an unreasonable doubt.