6 ms·

Plea bargaining should not exist. It makes a mockery of justice, turns the legal system into a marketplace where you bid for relative degrees of guilt and are r

Plea bargaining should not exist. It makes a mockery of justice, turns the legal system into a marketplace where you bid for relative degrees of guilt and are rewarded for "copping a plea", and occasionally snares the innocent. The war on drugs has clogged the system, but also our somewhat lawless and rudderless population since the early 1960s, when a generally orderly society gave way to a general contempt for authority. And the population has grown far faster than the number of courts to accommodate it. I think the only solution is to legalize drugs and build more courts to address the remaining cases more quickly and efficiently, without throwing due process out the window. Better education would help, too. And instill moral education in our children in the schools and at home. In the end, a more moral society will bring about a more moral justice system.

sneak 11y ago
A contempt for authority results in a healthy, vibrant society. You may recall what happened in the 30s in Germany when it was present to an insufficient degree, or in the US in Vietnam. There's a reason the 60s saw a backlash, and it wasn't disproportionate.
- blisterpeanuts 11y ago
  30s Germany was a completely different situation; it was the Great Depression, combined with the humiliation of total defeat in WWI and onerous terms of surrender. Germans rallied behind a strong leader and were willing to forego liberty for the sake of national pride. The 60s backlash against Vietnam was largely because they began drafting college students. It was an outlet for restless, idle youth who were the most pampered, spoiled generation in history. And it did nothing to shorten the war; in fact it gave moral support to the Communists at a time when they were very frustrated, e.g. the Tet Offensive which was a military failure for the North.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    Maybe if that contempt for authority had been more present when the US was first getting involved in Vietnam, that whole mess wouldn't have gotten as far as it did in the first place.
    - blisterpeanuts 11y ago
      I rather think if people had exercised the power of the vote and not allowed these morons into power who perpetrated that monstrous war in the first place. Look -- Goldwater was against the war. Actually he said, either get in and finish it quickly, or don't go in at all. But he lost, badly, to the Johnson machine that portrayed him as an extreme conservative nutcase. Think how different history might have been had he, or someone like him, been in power during that turbulent era, plus of course more intelligent Congresscritters.
  - MaysonL 11y ago
    No - college students got deferments: my older brother managed to avoid the draft by remaining in grad school till he was over 26. I had a deferment until I tore my draft card up and mailed it back to the draft board. The '60s backlash against Vietnam had many causes: left-wing agitators, a really stupid war supporting corrupt regimes, lots of college students who were a little too late for the civil rights movement.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Very wrong. We in the U.S. remember the 50's and 60's as the heyday of the country. Not confidentially, that's when public faith in U.S. institutions was at the highest.
  - reagency 11y ago
    How very not Black of you.
  - Ollinson 11y ago
    http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html enjoy
AnkhMorporkian 11y ago
> Plea bargaining should not exist. It makes a mockery of justice, turns the legal system into a marketplace where you bid for relative degrees of guilt and are rewarded for "copping a plea", and occasionally snares the innocent. I confess that I'm somewhat naive regarding the larger context of this. I have dealt with the criminal justice system, and I was very thankful for plea bargaining. I was, without a doubt, very guilty of what I was accused of doing and I knew that the state would have zero issue proving that and convicting me, and my lawyer tended to agree. I did not have the money to post bail (at the time I was very poor, the bail was very reasonable), and my lawyer told me that a jury trial would keep me in jail for far longer than my sentence would be if I pled down. With my plea bargain, I spent 22 days in jail. I likely would have been in jail for at least a month and a half, even if my lawyer pushed as hard as he could for a speedy trial. With that out of the way, while I understand that the plea bargain process is abused, isn't my case an example of why plea bargaining should exist, at least in a limited context? It saved everyone involved time and money.
- emn13 11y ago
  Not really. It's the state's duty to provide justice. That's what we've all kind of decided, and I don't think anyone is suggesting people take justice into their own hands. If we agree on that, it should be clear there are limits - the "state" isn't some omnipotent, omniscient being. It can't provide absolute justice, if we even knew what that was. There are going to need to be compromises. Plea bargaining represents a failure on both counts. The state isn't providing justice; it's meting out punishment without determining guilt. And it's similarly a failure that justice is too expensive; too unattainable - "we" made the rules, and apparently, voters via congress have made that process unreasonably expensive. The solution isn't to give just 3% of the people justice it's to be more realistic in our expectations so everyone gets a fair shot at justice. It shouldn't even be an option to deny people their day in court. I bet that if it were illegal to detain people for more than some limited amount of time before a hearing, and a few nice and gruesome murderers walked voters would get their priorities straight.
  - jschwartzi 11y ago
berlinbrown 11y ago
But did you read the article. So let's say plea bargain doesn't exist, then you spend years in jails waiting for a trial as opposed to copping a plea and maybe get timed served.
- blisterpeanuts 11y ago
  Yes, I read the article. Didn't you read my comment? I'm saying we need to reform the entire system, not just ban plea deals.
- tajen 11y ago
  If plea bargain doesn't exist, then everyone gets the same sentence for the same crime, and this sentence needs to be the average between plea- and guilty (otherwise new prisons will be required).
- gamblor956 11y ago
  Speedy trials are a constitutional right enshrined in the 6th Amendment; the only reason a person would spend years in jail waiting for trial is if they have explicitly waived their right to a speedy trial, which is either their fault or the fault of their incompetent legal counsel. Edit: In California, this is 60 days after arraignment for a felony. In the 5th Circuit (i.e,. the South) this can be up to 2 years. Most jurisdictions are between these two.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    Or an utterly broken legal system that disproportionally victimises people too poor to hire legal counsel that actually have the resources to present an effective attack on these abuses. This has been a massive ongoing problem in New York. The state gets away with regularly saying they're ready to proceed, get a court date well into the future, and then ask for more time again when the court date gets closer, and effectively gets most of the time "not counted" for the purpose of the court considering any claims about the lack of a speedy trial. They grind down defendants without sufficient resources to get anywhere before said defendants find it too gruelling and plead guilty. It's a system so broken that we even get cases like this[1] where someone who "beat it" ended up committing suicide afterwards. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/nyregion/kalief-browder-held-at-rikers-island-for-3-years-without-trial-commits-suicide.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/nyregion/kalief-browder-he...
467568985476 11y ago
I'm sorry to be so tactless with this, but the notion that the country was "generally orderly" until a "general contempt for authority" appeared in the 60s is ignorant and bordering on offensive. I would hardly call a national policy of racial segregation "ordered" except in the most pointlessly literal sense, and certainly not a desirable world to live in. Likewise, to characterize the rise of such ideas as feminism and pacifism as mere base anti-authoritarian chaos is to whitewash history and ignore the real injustices these movements have made progress in alleviating.
- bilbo0s 11y ago
  Well... there's that... but there's also the fact that society was just plain disorderly prior to 1960. Not only were there outlaw villains like the James gang, there were also outlaw CITIES and settlements. The O.K. Corral was not the ONLY location of brazen shootouts. Shootouts happened regularly throughout the US. Then the century turned... and even more dangerous weapons got into the hands of what proved to be a demonstratively immoral citizenry. Criminally inclined immigrants began arriving from Europe. Prostitution was commonplace. Husbands locked their wives away in asylums because it was cheaper than divorce. Don't even get me started on the level of graft in government at every level at that time. The "moral" era he's talking about is the same one that saw vets beaten to death on the National Mall. And Union organizers slaughtered. Naturally, all of that developed and culminated in respectably named organizations of thugs like "The Commission", or "La Cosa Nostra". Back then, the per capita crime rates of Chicago and New York make today's crime rates look tame. (Heck... the crime rates from 20 years ago make today's crime rates look tame!) In short... the "good old days"... were not always good... and tomorrow is never as bad as it seems.
- blisterpeanuts 11y ago
  Sorry to disagree, but despite your assertions and insults, society was absolutely more orderly. Don't conflate "orderly" with "fair"; they don't go together necessarily. In fact often it's the opposite. South Africa for example during the apartheid era was a relatively orderly place for both blacks and whites, and since the end of apartheid it's become the world center for murder and other violent crime. I've had countless conversations with people who witnessed the 30s, 40s, 50s and even earlier. My grandfather for example was born in 1900, passed away in '91, and I was able to learn what it was like growing up on the mean streets of Brooklyn in the early 1900s. For one thing, boys certainly had gangs, and there certainly was crime. Fights were not uncommon, and he had to fight plenty since he was on the short side. But if 2-3 boys were beating on one, others would intervene to break it up; that was considered unfair. Few carried knives, and no one carried guns. Women were not afraid to go for a walk. I know a 20-year-old musician who got beaten up walking home from a rehearsal. A skinny little girl with a violin, and she got her jaw broken by some piece-of-shit mugger. That would have been almost unheard of in an earlier era. It truly was a different world. The New York subways were safe at 2 in the morning. There was little or no road rage. People were safe in their homes in most places. Sure, there were spectacular crimes and notorious criminals, but they were notable more for their exceptionalism than anything else. The average citizen's life was rather boring, actually, which is why these edge cases got sensationalized. My mother told me of a news report on the front page of the local paper, that some college students had caroused and caused a disruption on the train the previous night. This was considered front page news in the old days! In the U.S., prior to desegregation, black families despite the injustice of racism were far more functional than today; in the 1920s, 80% of black families had a mother and father, and the father was generally employed. Today that ratio is reversed and only 20% are 2-parent homes; furthermore the father is often destitute, drug/alcohol addicted, or in prison. No, I'm not advocating a return to segregation. I'm just pointing out that we have a vastly more disorderly and dysfunctional society today in many ways.
MaysonL 11y ago
There's also the personal ambition of many prosecutors. See Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie for example, and countless other US Attorneys and District Attorneys and state Attorneys General. One of the ways to enhance your reputation as a prosecutor is to have a stellar (i.e. very high) conviction rate. Plea bargains count as convictions.
- blisterpeanuts 11y ago
  Interesting that you should single out two Republicans, both known for being reformers rather than abusers of the system. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Christie: Besides doubling the size of the anticorruption unit for New Jersey,[61] Christie also prosecuted other federal crimes. For example, he obtained convictions of brothel owners who kept Mexican teenagers in slavery as prostitutes, convicted 42 gang members of the Double II Set of various crimes including more than 25 murders, and convicted British trader Hemant Lakhani of trying to sell missiles.[62] Despite claims of entrapment,[63] Lakhani was convicted by jury in April 2005 of attempting to provide material support to terrorists, unlawful brokering of foreign defense articles, and attempting to import merchandise into the U.S. by means of false statements, plus two counts of money laundering. He was sentenced to 47 years in prison.[64] Giuliani made his name prosecuting the "Five Families" back in the 1980s, the Mafia Commission Trial which helped put away the leaders of the most notorious Mafia families and some of their associates. Giuliani also prosecuted Boesky and Milken, the infamous Wall Street financiers. There are indeed quite a few very bad players, like U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz, whose notoriously overly zealous attack on the MIT Library hacker Aaron Swartz drove him to commit suicide. [EDITED for typos, formatting]
njharman 11y ago
Nope. Leaded gas caused increase in crime http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-caused-americas-violent-crime-epidemic/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-ca...
imroot 11y ago
Unfortunately, the current criminal system requires plea bargaining to exist, because, if it didn't happen, you wouldn't have enough judges, juries, or courtrooms to handle the mess. A few years ago in California, a District Attorney who was running for re-election made the edict during campaign time declared that there was to be no more plea bargaining. Unfortunately, what happened was that prosecutors could not handle the trials, and had to release a fair amount of inmates for speedy trial violations, had to move cases to other counties who had the availability of courtrooms, and cases that should have been resolved in six months were taking upwards of a year to go through the motions of a trial. Suffice to say, plea motions are the grease that keep the 'speedy trial' machine running in the United States.

sneak 11y ago

A contempt for authority results in a healthy, vibrant society. You may recall what happened in the 30s in Germany when it was present to an insufficient degree, or in the US in Vietnam. There's a reason the 60s saw a backlash, and it wasn't disproportionate.

blisterpeanuts 11y ago
30s Germany was a completely different situation; it was the Great Depression, combined with the humiliation of total defeat in WWI and onerous terms of surrender. Germans rallied behind a strong leader and were willing to forego liberty for the sake of national pride. The 60s backlash against Vietnam was largely because they began drafting college students. It was an outlet for restless, idle youth who were the most pampered, spoiled generation in history. And it did nothing to shorten the war; in fact it gave moral support to the Communists at a time when they were very frustrated, e.g. the Tet Offensive which was a military failure for the North.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Maybe if that contempt for authority had been more present when the US was first getting involved in Vietnam, that whole mess wouldn't have gotten as far as it did in the first place.
  - blisterpeanuts 11y ago
    I rather think if people had exercised the power of the vote and not allowed these morons into power who perpetrated that monstrous war in the first place. Look -- Goldwater was against the war. Actually he said, either get in and finish it quickly, or don't go in at all. But he lost, badly, to the Johnson machine that portrayed him as an extreme conservative nutcase. Think how different history might have been had he, or someone like him, been in power during that turbulent era, plus of course more intelligent Congresscritters.
- MaysonL 11y ago
  No - college students got deferments: my older brother managed to avoid the draft by remaining in grad school till he was over 26. I had a deferment until I tore my draft card up and mailed it back to the draft board. The '60s backlash against Vietnam had many causes: left-wing agitators, a really stupid war supporting corrupt regimes, lots of college students who were a little too late for the civil rights movement.
rayiner 11y ago
Very wrong. We in the U.S. remember the 50's and 60's as the heyday of the country. Not confidentially, that's when public faith in U.S. institutions was at the highest.
- reagency 11y ago
  How very not Black of you.
- Ollinson 11y ago
  http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html enjoy

AnkhMorporkian 11y ago

> Plea bargaining should not exist. It makes a mockery of justice, turns the legal system into a marketplace where you bid for relative degrees of guilt and are rewarded for "copping a plea", and occasionally snares the innocent. I confess that I'm somewhat naive regarding the larger context of this. I have dealt with the criminal justice system, and I was very thankful for plea bargaining. I was, without a doubt, very guilty of what I was accused of doing and I knew that the state would have zero issue proving that and convicting me, and my lawyer tended to agree. I did not have the money to post bail (at the time I was very poor, the bail was very reasonable), and my lawyer told me that a jury trial would keep me in jail for far longer than my sentence would be if I pled down. With my plea bargain, I spent 22 days in jail. I likely would have been in jail for at least a month and a half, even if my lawyer pushed as hard as he could for a speedy trial. With that out of the way, while I understand that the plea bargain process is abused, isn't my case an example of why plea bargaining should exist, at least in a limited context? It saved everyone involved time and money.

emn13 11y ago
Not really. It's the state's duty to provide justice. That's what we've all kind of decided, and I don't think anyone is suggesting people take justice into their own hands. If we agree on that, it should be clear there are limits - the "state" isn't some omnipotent, omniscient being. It can't provide absolute justice, if we even knew what that was. There are going to need to be compromises. Plea bargaining represents a failure on both counts. The state isn't providing justice; it's meting out punishment without determining guilt. And it's similarly a failure that justice is too expensive; too unattainable - "we" made the rules, and apparently, voters via congress have made that process unreasonably expensive. The solution isn't to give just 3% of the people justice it's to be more realistic in our expectations so everyone gets a fair shot at justice. It shouldn't even be an option to deny people their day in court. I bet that if it were illegal to detain people for more than some limited amount of time before a hearing, and a few nice and gruesome murderers walked voters would get their priorities straight.
- jschwartzi 11y ago

berlinbrown 11y ago

But did you read the article. So let's say plea bargain doesn't exist, then you spend years in jails waiting for a trial as opposed to copping a plea and maybe get timed served.

blisterpeanuts 11y ago
Yes, I read the article. Didn't you read my comment? I'm saying we need to reform the entire system, not just ban plea deals.
tajen 11y ago
If plea bargain doesn't exist, then everyone gets the same sentence for the same crime, and this sentence needs to be the average between plea- and guilty (otherwise new prisons will be required).
gamblor956 11y ago
Speedy trials are a constitutional right enshrined in the 6th Amendment; the only reason a person would spend years in jail waiting for trial is if they have explicitly waived their right to a speedy trial, which is either their fault or the fault of their incompetent legal counsel. Edit: In California, this is 60 days after arraignment for a felony. In the 5th Circuit (i.e,. the South) this can be up to 2 years. Most jurisdictions are between these two.
- vidarh 11y ago
  Or an utterly broken legal system that disproportionally victimises people too poor to hire legal counsel that actually have the resources to present an effective attack on these abuses. This has been a massive ongoing problem in New York. The state gets away with regularly saying they're ready to proceed, get a court date well into the future, and then ask for more time again when the court date gets closer, and effectively gets most of the time "not counted" for the purpose of the court considering any claims about the lack of a speedy trial. They grind down defendants without sufficient resources to get anywhere before said defendants find it too gruelling and plead guilty. It's a system so broken that we even get cases like this[1] where someone who "beat it" ended up committing suicide afterwards. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/nyregion/kalief-browder-held-at-rikers-island-for-3-years-without-trial-commits-suicide.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/nyregion/kalief-browder-he...

467568985476 11y ago

I'm sorry to be so tactless with this, but the notion that the country was "generally orderly" until a "general contempt for authority" appeared in the 60s is ignorant and bordering on offensive. I would hardly call a national policy of racial segregation "ordered" except in the most pointlessly literal sense, and certainly not a desirable world to live in. Likewise, to characterize the rise of such ideas as feminism and pacifism as mere base anti-authoritarian chaos is to whitewash history and ignore the real injustices these movements have made progress in alleviating.

bilbo0s 11y ago
Well... there's that... but there's also the fact that society was just plain disorderly prior to 1960. Not only were there outlaw villains like the James gang, there were also outlaw CITIES and settlements. The O.K. Corral was not the ONLY location of brazen shootouts. Shootouts happened regularly throughout the US. Then the century turned... and even more dangerous weapons got into the hands of what proved to be a demonstratively immoral citizenry. Criminally inclined immigrants began arriving from Europe. Prostitution was commonplace. Husbands locked their wives away in asylums because it was cheaper than divorce. Don't even get me started on the level of graft in government at every level at that time. The "moral" era he's talking about is the same one that saw vets beaten to death on the National Mall. And Union organizers slaughtered. Naturally, all of that developed and culminated in respectably named organizations of thugs like "The Commission", or "La Cosa Nostra". Back then, the per capita crime rates of Chicago and New York make today's crime rates look tame. (Heck... the crime rates from 20 years ago make today's crime rates look tame!) In short... the "good old days"... were not always good... and tomorrow is never as bad as it seems.
blisterpeanuts 11y ago
Sorry to disagree, but despite your assertions and insults, society was absolutely more orderly. Don't conflate "orderly" with "fair"; they don't go together necessarily. In fact often it's the opposite. South Africa for example during the apartheid era was a relatively orderly place for both blacks and whites, and since the end of apartheid it's become the world center for murder and other violent crime. I've had countless conversations with people who witnessed the 30s, 40s, 50s and even earlier. My grandfather for example was born in 1900, passed away in '91, and I was able to learn what it was like growing up on the mean streets of Brooklyn in the early 1900s. For one thing, boys certainly had gangs, and there certainly was crime. Fights were not uncommon, and he had to fight plenty since he was on the short side. But if 2-3 boys were beating on one, others would intervene to break it up; that was considered unfair. Few carried knives, and no one carried guns. Women were not afraid to go for a walk. I know a 20-year-old musician who got beaten up walking home from a rehearsal. A skinny little girl with a violin, and she got her jaw broken by some piece-of-shit mugger. That would have been almost unheard of in an earlier era. It truly was a different world. The New York subways were safe at 2 in the morning. There was little or no road rage. People were safe in their homes in most places. Sure, there were spectacular crimes and notorious criminals, but they were notable more for their exceptionalism than anything else. The average citizen's life was rather boring, actually, which is why these edge cases got sensationalized. My mother told me of a news report on the front page of the local paper, that some college students had caroused and caused a disruption on the train the previous night. This was considered front page news in the old days! In the U.S., prior to desegregation, black families despite the injustice of racism were far more functional than today; in the 1920s, 80% of black families had a mother and father, and the father was generally employed. Today that ratio is reversed and only 20% are 2-parent homes; furthermore the father is often destitute, drug/alcohol addicted, or in prison. No, I'm not advocating a return to segregation. I'm just pointing out that we have a vastly more disorderly and dysfunctional society today in many ways.

MaysonL 11y ago

There's also the personal ambition of many prosecutors. See Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie for example, and countless other US Attorneys and District Attorneys and state Attorneys General. One of the ways to enhance your reputation as a prosecutor is to have a stellar (i.e. very high) conviction rate. Plea bargains count as convictions.

blisterpeanuts 11y ago
Interesting that you should single out two Republicans, both known for being reformers rather than abusers of the system. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Christie: Besides doubling the size of the anticorruption unit for New Jersey,[61] Christie also prosecuted other federal crimes. For example, he obtained convictions of brothel owners who kept Mexican teenagers in slavery as prostitutes, convicted 42 gang members of the Double II Set of various crimes including more than 25 murders, and convicted British trader Hemant Lakhani of trying to sell missiles.[62] Despite claims of entrapment,[63] Lakhani was convicted by jury in April 2005 of attempting to provide material support to terrorists, unlawful brokering of foreign defense articles, and attempting to import merchandise into the U.S. by means of false statements, plus two counts of money laundering. He was sentenced to 47 years in prison.[64] Giuliani made his name prosecuting the "Five Families" back in the 1980s, the Mafia Commission Trial which helped put away the leaders of the most notorious Mafia families and some of their associates. Giuliani also prosecuted Boesky and Milken, the infamous Wall Street financiers. There are indeed quite a few very bad players, like U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz, whose notoriously overly zealous attack on the MIT Library hacker Aaron Swartz drove him to commit suicide. [EDITED for typos, formatting]

njharman 11y ago

Nope. Leaded gas caused increase in crime http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-caused-americas-violent-crime-epidemic/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-ca...

imroot 11y ago

Unfortunately, the current criminal system requires plea bargaining to exist, because, if it didn't happen, you wouldn't have enough judges, juries, or courtrooms to handle the mess. A few years ago in California, a District Attorney who was running for re-election made the edict during campaign time declared that there was to be no more plea bargaining. Unfortunately, what happened was that prosecutors could not handle the trials, and had to release a fair amount of inmates for speedy trial violations, had to move cases to other counties who had the availability of courtrooms, and cases that should have been resolved in six months were taking upwards of a year to go through the motions of a trial. Suffice to say, plea motions are the grease that keep the 'speedy trial' machine running in the United States.