I worked for the Public Defender during an election year. The local D.A. was trying to divert attention from a sex scandal and instructed the ADAs not to negot

I worked for the Public Defender during an election year. The local D.A. was trying to divert attention from a sex scandal and instructed the ADAs not to negotiate down on any crimes so that he could "look tough" on crime. The thinking was that most criminal defendants would cave and he would get a boost with the mostly-conservative voters of the county. So the lawyers of the Public Defender (and a good portion of the private criminal defense bar) banded together and convinced about a quarter of our clients to go to trial (up from 1 in every 100 or so). I worked in a specialty division (mentally "disordered" defendants) where we got to make the decisions for our clients, and we took almost every case to trial. We also made sure that every defendant going to trial refused to waive his right to a speedy trial, meaning that cases had to go to trial within about 2-3 months or they would get thrown out. The consequences? (1) To avoid speedy-trial issues, the D.A.'s office had to transfer cases out to the boonies of our county whereever there were available courtrooms for trials, and ADA's unfamiliar with these cases would take them to trial. They either lost these cases at trial or watched them get thrown out when they could not start on time (frequently, because their expert witnesses could not schedule court appearances on such short notice). (2) A backlog of criminal and MD cases that jammed up the court docket, pushing back other cases (i.e., civil lawsuits) 5 years or more. 2009 to 2010 was not a good time to file a lawsuit in that county. (3) An enraged judiciary that began throwing out criminal cases with wild abandon, including almost all drug possession cases, nonviolent misdemeanors, and lower-level non-violent felonies. (4) The D.A. lost his reelection campaign, by double-digits. The nuclear option worked, and the next D.A. rescinded the non-negotiation order. EDIT: I should point out that this worked because massive budget reductions to the court system during this time period artificially reduced the number of courts in the county. Without those budget reductions, we would have needed many more trial-ready cases to nuke the system.