Plea bargains are voluntary. People enter into plea bargains most frequently because they are actually guilty. They're not looking to avoid jail or prison; t

Plea bargains are voluntary. People enter into plea bargains most frequently because they are actually guilty. They're not looking to avoid jail or prison; they're merely hoping to minimize the time they do have to spend locked up. It seems like in the US you can simply avoid jail by not making a plea bargain. Seriously, with those rates I bet prosecutors just bail the second the plea bargain isn't signed. Well, yes. That's actually a strategy that many criminal defense attorneys use. I was lucky enough to be working for a public defender's office when they used it against the local d.a.'s office, after the D.A. decided his reelection chances would be improved if he was even harsher on defendants than he already was. Long story short: for a brief period of time, the waiting period for courtrooms shot up to 2-3 years for criminal cases and 10 years for civil cases. Nothing can happen in court, so everything hits the fan, and the prosecution side of the criminal system breaks down. (The defense side is mostly unaffected.) The whole point of judicial system is that if you get people fighting for both sides, you should get a socially appropriate punishment for what really happened. This doesn't happen with plea bargains any time. No, that's not it at all. The point of having opposing parties is that a vigorous presentation of the facts by opposing parties tends to reveal (in theory) most of the facts necessary to discern what happened (or as close as you can get without actually being there). Innocent people make pleas from fear of getting nailed with something worse No, they don't. This is a fiction created by media. Innocent people fight like hell. They mortgage their homes, raid their retirement funds, max out their credit cards. The risk of insolvency is worth if if you're innocent, since pleading guilty can be an economic death sentence if they plead to felony-level crimes.