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I doubt anyone disagrees with your idealism, but take the example of a guilty man who has a small but real chance of avoiding any repercussion due to mistrial.

I doubt anyone disagrees with your idealism, but take the example of a guilty man who has a small but real chance of avoiding any repercussion due to mistrial. It benefits the prosecution, the defendant, and society if there can be a way to mitigate that risk by shortening his punishment. The real question becomes how do you propose fixing the cons that arise from this obvious benefit?

elmuchoprez 14y ago
What is the obvious benefit and how are you quantifying it?
- jpwagner 14y ago
  how are you quantifying it It's a silly question, so I'll give a silly answer. Suppose we have a man who, from the ages of 30 to 60, is likely to kill a person each year with probability 1/$age. Now suppose he's on trial for murder (a crime he is guilty of) and there's a 99% chance he spends life in prison and a 1% chance he spends no time in prison due to a mistrial. The overall probability he will kill again is ~ 0.7% Suppose instead that we put him in jail for 10 years with 100% probability (ie, a deal that a logical actor would take facing life in prison with 99% probability) and each year he spends in jail his desire to kill decreases by a factor of 2. Now his overall probability of killing again is ~ 0.04%. So the killer's situation has improved and society's situation has improved. </silly answer>
  - elmuchoprez 14y ago
    Perhaps silly, but let me explain a little more. Here's the scenario I envisioned after reading your original comment: Say you have 10 people who have committed a crime and under the current system 9 get convicted and go to jail for 10 years and and 1 gets off on a technicality. So, there's collectively 90 years of prison time being served. Now imagine we introduce plea bargaining and offer 5 years to all those accused and all 10 take it. The conviction rate goes up, but the total amount of jail time being served is drastically down. Now I don't know what kind of "discounts" plea deals usually offer, or what it increase the conviction rate to, but I doubt it's an "obvious" win if you're counting by the number of years convicted offenders are removed from society. Reading your silly answer, I think you're arguing something even less "obvious", which is that willingness to commit a crime is a direct function of age. And if that's the case, and if we're measuring benefit by a decrease in one's willingness to commit a crime, well then your system makes sense because any jail time is essentially better than none because the majority of the decrease in willingness to commit a crime happens at the front end of the sentence anyways. But I think that requires a broad assumption about the correlation of age and crime.
    - jpwagner 14y ago
      That's a fair point. I would argue that we're not trying to optimize time in prison but benefit to society. Your argument relies on a linear(ish) relationship between the two.
  - brudgers 14y ago
    Your argument depends upon omniscience. It's not silly. It's absurd.
    - jpwagner 14y ago
      That's why the question is silly. The absurd answer illustrates a point. Fiction can illustrate a philosophy.
      - brudgers 14y ago
        The question doesn't seem silly to me. I didn't see any obvious benefit. It took a lot of work to find a possible candidate for an obvious benefit. Yet, given the recent utilitarian turn of your comments, I doubt that a Hobbesian analysis was the basis for the claim.
  - dripton 14y ago
    You're assuming that he won't murder anyone in prison.
alan_cx 14y ago
I would rather a guilty man gets off than an innocent being wrongly convicted every single time. Law is there to protect the innocent first, if not, then it has no purpose. The guilty and always be gotten later on, the wrongly convicted innocent is ruined for life. If the innocent cant rely on the justice system, again, it is fundamentally broken.
- jpwagner 14y ago
  ...rather a guilty man gets off than an innocent being wrongly convicted... obviously. but you have to actually show that the possibility of a "plea bargain" trades one-for-one (or anything unreasonable) for your argument to be convincing.
  - brudgers 14y ago
    The idea that convicting the innocent is the ultimate injustice is not an argument, it is a moral stance. That moral stance accepts the possibility of human error to a degree which makes it impossible to meet the standard you propose.
    - jpwagner 14y ago
      a "jury of your peers" is no more infallible
      - TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
        You mean a jury of people too stupid to figure out how to get out of jury duty? The common man cares about Kim Kardassian, and what celeb is with who. Or sports..
      - brudgers 14y ago
        There aren't degrees of infallibility and a jury of one's peers may be less fallible.
- tsotha 14y ago
brudgers 14y ago
[IANAL] In common law "guilty man" has already been convicted. It is the accused who plea bargain. [/IANAL] But I will take a bite at your idealism and for the sake of conversation presume you are speaking of morality and forgo debating whether there is a persistent nexus between one's legal and moral responsibilities - the heart of the Swartz tragedy. When our guilty man bargains in his interest, it is an individual choice. When the government presses for plea bargains in order to reduce the number cases which go to trial, it is a matter of policy - a policy based upon facts unrelated to the guilt or innocence of the guilty man. The policy treats the morally innocent and morally guilty identically. This should give us pause. Our very notions of moral justice require its agents to treat the morally innocent and the morally guilty differently. An agent who treats the morally innocent and morally guilty identically cannot be dispensing moral justice. As such an agent, the government is neither moral nor immoral. It is amoral. The facts of the case cease to matter. Convictions justify the means of coercion. I am willing to accept that some may see this as an "obvious benefit" - e.g. Thomas Hobbes accepted the amoral government as the least worse among the alternatives and with such a sovereign, the morally guilty man bargaining for a lesser sentence is always just: "A Mans Covenant Not To Defend Himselfe, Is Voyd." Of course, given Hobbes view of morality, we may be better just sticking with the legal sphere: For Morall Philosophy is nothing else but the Science of what is Good, and Evill, in the conversation, and Society of mankind. Good, and Evill, are names that signifie our Appetites, and Aversions; which in different tempers, customes, and doctrines of men, are different...
betterunix 14y ago
Here I was, thinking the we wanted to eliminate the risk of an innocent man who accepts a plea bargain because he fears that he will lose a trial. That happens all the time, far more frequently than guilty men being released due to a mistrial. Society is actively harmed when innocent men accept plea bargains and admit (falsely) to committing a crime. People lose their faith that the justice system actually protects them when their friends are all imprisoned despite having done nothing wrong. Take, for example, the widespread fear among the police of a public with lots of cameras -- it's not that the majority of cops are worried about their corruption being caught on camera (most cops are not corrupt), it's that they fear that a recording of their actions will be edited to make it appear that they were corrupt. Only someone who has lost their faith in the criminal justice system would engage in such an act, and such people have lost their faith because they keep seeing people go to prison without receiving a trial, regardless of guilt of innocence.

elmuchoprez 14y ago

What is the obvious benefit and how are you quantifying it?

jpwagner 14y ago
how are you quantifying it It's a silly question, so I'll give a silly answer. Suppose we have a man who, from the ages of 30 to 60, is likely to kill a person each year with probability 1/$age. Now suppose he's on trial for murder (a crime he is guilty of) and there's a 99% chance he spends life in prison and a 1% chance he spends no time in prison due to a mistrial. The overall probability he will kill again is ~ 0.7% Suppose instead that we put him in jail for 10 years with 100% probability (ie, a deal that a logical actor would take facing life in prison with 99% probability) and each year he spends in jail his desire to kill decreases by a factor of 2. Now his overall probability of killing again is ~ 0.04%. So the killer's situation has improved and society's situation has improved. </silly answer>
- elmuchoprez 14y ago
  Perhaps silly, but let me explain a little more. Here's the scenario I envisioned after reading your original comment: Say you have 10 people who have committed a crime and under the current system 9 get convicted and go to jail for 10 years and and 1 gets off on a technicality. So, there's collectively 90 years of prison time being served. Now imagine we introduce plea bargaining and offer 5 years to all those accused and all 10 take it. The conviction rate goes up, but the total amount of jail time being served is drastically down. Now I don't know what kind of "discounts" plea deals usually offer, or what it increase the conviction rate to, but I doubt it's an "obvious" win if you're counting by the number of years convicted offenders are removed from society. Reading your silly answer, I think you're arguing something even less "obvious", which is that willingness to commit a crime is a direct function of age. And if that's the case, and if we're measuring benefit by a decrease in one's willingness to commit a crime, well then your system makes sense because any jail time is essentially better than none because the majority of the decrease in willingness to commit a crime happens at the front end of the sentence anyways. But I think that requires a broad assumption about the correlation of age and crime.
  - jpwagner 14y ago
    That's a fair point. I would argue that we're not trying to optimize time in prison but benefit to society. Your argument relies on a linear(ish) relationship between the two.
- brudgers 14y ago
  Your argument depends upon omniscience. It's not silly. It's absurd.
  - jpwagner 14y ago
    That's why the question is silly. The absurd answer illustrates a point. Fiction can illustrate a philosophy.
    - brudgers 14y ago
      The question doesn't seem silly to me. I didn't see any obvious benefit. It took a lot of work to find a possible candidate for an obvious benefit. Yet, given the recent utilitarian turn of your comments, I doubt that a Hobbesian analysis was the basis for the claim.
- dripton 14y ago
  You're assuming that he won't murder anyone in prison.

alan_cx 14y ago

I would rather a guilty man gets off than an innocent being wrongly convicted every single time. Law is there to protect the innocent first, if not, then it has no purpose. The guilty and always be gotten later on, the wrongly convicted innocent is ruined for life. If the innocent cant rely on the justice system, again, it is fundamentally broken.

jpwagner 14y ago
...rather a guilty man gets off than an innocent being wrongly convicted... obviously. but you have to actually show that the possibility of a "plea bargain" trades one-for-one (or anything unreasonable) for your argument to be convincing.
- brudgers 14y ago
  The idea that convicting the innocent is the ultimate injustice is not an argument, it is a moral stance. That moral stance accepts the possibility of human error to a degree which makes it impossible to meet the standard you propose.
  - jpwagner 14y ago
    a "jury of your peers" is no more infallible
    - TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
      You mean a jury of people too stupid to figure out how to get out of jury duty? The common man cares about Kim Kardassian, and what celeb is with who. Or sports..
    - brudgers 14y ago
      There aren't degrees of infallibility and a jury of one's peers may be less fallible.
tsotha 14y ago

brudgers 14y ago

[IANAL] In common law "guilty man" has already been convicted. It is the accused who plea bargain. [/IANAL] But I will take a bite at your idealism and for the sake of conversation presume you are speaking of morality and forgo debating whether there is a persistent nexus between one's legal and moral responsibilities - the heart of the Swartz tragedy. When our guilty man bargains in his interest, it is an individual choice. When the government presses for plea bargains in order to reduce the number cases which go to trial, it is a matter of policy - a policy based upon facts unrelated to the guilt or innocence of the guilty man. The policy treats the morally innocent and morally guilty identically. This should give us pause. Our very notions of moral justice require its agents to treat the morally innocent and the morally guilty differently. An agent who treats the morally innocent and morally guilty identically cannot be dispensing moral justice. As such an agent, the government is neither moral nor immoral. It is amoral. The facts of the case cease to matter. Convictions justify the means of coercion. I am willing to accept that some may see this as an "obvious benefit" - e.g. Thomas Hobbes accepted the amoral government as the least worse among the alternatives and with such a sovereign, the morally guilty man bargaining for a lesser sentence is always just: "A Mans Covenant Not To Defend Himselfe, Is Voyd." Of course, given Hobbes view of morality, we may be better just sticking with the legal sphere: For Morall Philosophy is nothing else but the Science of what is Good, and Evill, in the conversation, and Society of mankind. Good, and Evill, are names that signifie our Appetites, and Aversions; which in different tempers, customes, and doctrines of men, are different...

betterunix 14y ago

Here I was, thinking the we wanted to eliminate the risk of an innocent man who accepts a plea bargain because he fears that he will lose a trial. That happens all the time, far more frequently than guilty men being released due to a mistrial. Society is actively harmed when innocent men accept plea bargains and admit (falsely) to committing a crime. People lose their faith that the justice system actually protects them when their friends are all imprisoned despite having done nothing wrong. Take, for example, the widespread fear among the police of a public with lots of cameras -- it's not that the majority of cops are worried about their corruption being caught on camera (most cops are not corrupt), it's that they fear that a recording of their actions will be edited to make it appear that they were corrupt. Only someone who has lost their faith in the criminal justice system would engage in such an act, and such people have lost their faith because they keep seeing people go to prison without receiving a trial, regardless of guilt of innocence.