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This is exactly why in many other Western countries pleas are essentially non-existent in criminal prosecutions. The whole plea system creates an environment wh

This is exactly why in many other Western countries pleas are essentially non-existent in criminal prosecutions. The whole plea system creates an environment where miscarriages of justice can easily occur (e.g. innocent pleading guilty due to the cost of a trial/time they would spend in jail awaiting trial, or other prisoners false testifying in exchange for a lighter sentence in their own crime). But Wikipedia covers why the plea system is horrifying is pretty great detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargain The American justice system from a foreigner's perspective just seems like a revolving door punishment system with almost no reform, and one where money plays a MASSIVE part. If you're rich you won't spend any time in jail, and you likely won't be convicted even if guilty. If you're poor you can be innocent and still have to plead guilty because you lack the $100K you'd need to mount a real defence (and you'd still lose). I genuinely believe there are some good individuals in the US justice system, but most of the people at the top and the politicised prosecutors, politicians, and judges just ruin it. You could easily improve American justice tomorrow by scraping most pleas, re-introducing the right to a speedy trial (e.g. 12 months in jail to be found innocent is immoral/unjust), and increasing public defender funding significantly (at least 20x).

sanderjd 12y ago
Sadly, we don't need good ideas for how the system should function – lots of people have lots of those – we need good strategies for affecting change in the current system toward those ideas. Just to illustrate using your ideas (which I'm absolutely all for), all three of them cost public money. We would have more trials requiring more time in front of judges, but they would need to be speedier, so we would simply need to pay more judges salaries. A similar calculation suggests we would need to pay more public defenders, and if I'm interpreting your last point correctly, we would also want to pay them 20% more than we do currently. So we need a strategy for selling the tax increases at least at the state level – because the districts most affected by these cost increases are probably the least wealthy – and perhaps the federal level. Not many people will care enough that we aren't treating criminals (which is what people who have been arrested are, to most people) well enough to pay extra taxes. So I guess, what's the strategy to push us onto a path outside this spiral?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- pcurve 12y ago
  Fewer prosecutions. Only pursue cases that are slam dunk prioritized by cases that have highest social benefits. More community service based punishment. None resulting in rap sheet. Drastically reduce jury system. Pay Clawback and impose penalty on judge and prosecutors for wrongful convictions. Hit their collective pay pool.
- ams6110 12y ago
  Paying for more judges, prosecutors, and defenders might be one solution. But consider that a huge fraction of our criminal justice system is occupied by drug-related offenses. Another large fraction is occupied by violent crimes related to drug trafficking. It would be an interesting experiment to unload that from the courts and then see how speedily the remaining cases could be tried.
- TheCoelacanth 12y ago
  Or we could just stop prosecuting so many people. The US has far more people incarcerated than any other country. Clearly we could function perfectly well without having so many trials that we need to have plea bargaining.
hackuser 12y ago
> I genuinely believe there are some good individuals in the US justice system, but most of the people at the top and the politicised prosecutors, politicians, and judges just ruin it. I disagree with this conclusion: It's too easy to blame someone else, a way of maintaining our own sense of innocence. Things happen in a democracy when voters insist on it. I'm willing to bet that nobody reading this will do anything about this problem. The great majority will not even vote for their local politicians and can't even name them besides governor and mayor (try it: name your state legislators and judges). EDIT: How many reading this would serve if called for jury or grand jury duty? Finally, the political elite behave the same all over the country. That's either a massive coincidence of bad apples or it's a systematic problem. Most people reading this would (and some probably do) behave the same in those situations. "We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo (Walt Kelly)
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  I've always found this argument from voter apathy to be unpersuasive and arrogant. The voting system in the United States is rather uniquely damaged with its first-past-the-post (majoritarian) elections, over a century's worth of gerrymandering that goes on strong as ever, stringent ballot access laws, public debate restrictions (which I take became stronger after Ross Perot) and so on. It has all been meticulously crafted so that the odds are against any form of profound change, but rather to enforce the party dichotomy and have representatives maintain a comfortable status quo. The aforementioned gerrymandering strongly encourages vehement and almost parade-like, but ultimately empty and financially wasteful political campaigns, along with focusing one's efforts on leaving an impression only in certain key states and districts that are really decisive to one's performance. Yet even people who are well versed in statistics and probability often seem to grant an exception for the insanity of voting in the United States, out of a perverse democratic ideal that ultimately isn't really there. Without some truly disruptive changes to how elections are structured (hardly a trivial matter, what with the rather fundamental chilling effect they'd have on how people have been doing things for so long), I personally find voting to be not worth one's time.
  - waqf 12y ago
harshreality 12y ago
A few other points: - Common law vs Civil law... reliance more on legal precedent than on codified laws makes the legal field unnecessarily complex. If common-law defenses or other considerations are not included in the plain text of codified laws, the codified laws need to be fixed. - Adversarial system vs inquisitional system. These need not be disjoint. Some sort of hybrid where the judge (and jury) can ask pointed questions of witnesses, or ask for elaboration on some point a lawyer is making, seems prudent. That's not to say the adversarial system is entirely bad. The notion, at least in civil cases, and for the defense in criminal cases, that the parties need their own dedicated advocate, is certainly valuable. - Too many laws. The externalities of creating more and more laws seem lost on legislators (figuratively speaking; not truly lost, but ignored, since it ensures job security for lawyers). - Reform of the incentives for prosecutors. The objective should not be to win cases, but to serve the public interest. Criminal prosecutions should not really have dedicated advocates intent on trying to convict the defendant, but that's what prosecutors in the United States usually are. Rating prosecutors by conviction rates is absurd unless you've already decided that every defendant is guilty.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Rating prosecutors by conviction rates is absurd unless you've already decided that every defendant is guilty. Untrue. Its also reasonable if you assume that the legal system outside of the prosecutor works perfectly, and therefore, independent of the prosecutors actions, no innocent defendant will be convicted. With that assumption, a high conviction rate means that the prosecutor is serving the public interest by not charging the innocent. Of course, reality deviates from this in a number of ways, most critically in the high rate of plea bargains and the lack of evidence testing in the case of plea bargains.
  - corndoge 12y ago
    In other words...you've already decided that every defendant is guilty. "A defendant is a person or entity accused of a crime in criminal prosecution or a person or entity against whom some type of civil relief is being sought in a civil case." [0] I wouldn't say what he said is untrue, you're just refuting his statement based on the definition of a defendant (whether a defendant is someone charged with a crime vs being prosecuted against). Sounds like you have different definitions that lead to slightly different relations of the same situation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defendant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defendant

sanderjd 12y ago

Sadly, we don't need good ideas for how the system should function – lots of people have lots of those – we need good strategies for affecting change in the current system toward those ideas. Just to illustrate using your ideas (which I'm absolutely all for), all three of them cost public money. We would have more trials requiring more time in front of judges, but they would need to be speedier, so we would simply need to pay more judges salaries. A similar calculation suggests we would need to pay more public defenders, and if I'm interpreting your last point correctly, we would also want to pay them 20% more than we do currently. So we need a strategy for selling the tax increases at least at the state level – because the districts most affected by these cost increases are probably the least wealthy – and perhaps the federal level. Not many people will care enough that we aren't treating criminals (which is what people who have been arrested are, to most people) well enough to pay extra taxes. So I guess, what's the strategy to push us onto a path outside this spiral?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
pcurve 12y ago
Fewer prosecutions. Only pursue cases that are slam dunk prioritized by cases that have highest social benefits. More community service based punishment. None resulting in rap sheet. Drastically reduce jury system. Pay Clawback and impose penalty on judge and prosecutors for wrongful convictions. Hit their collective pay pool.
ams6110 12y ago
Paying for more judges, prosecutors, and defenders might be one solution. But consider that a huge fraction of our criminal justice system is occupied by drug-related offenses. Another large fraction is occupied by violent crimes related to drug trafficking. It would be an interesting experiment to unload that from the courts and then see how speedily the remaining cases could be tried.
TheCoelacanth 12y ago
Or we could just stop prosecuting so many people. The US has far more people incarcerated than any other country. Clearly we could function perfectly well without having so many trials that we need to have plea bargaining.

hackuser 12y ago

> I genuinely believe there are some good individuals in the US justice system, but most of the people at the top and the politicised prosecutors, politicians, and judges just ruin it. I disagree with this conclusion: It's too easy to blame someone else, a way of maintaining our own sense of innocence. Things happen in a democracy when voters insist on it. I'm willing to bet that nobody reading this will do anything about this problem. The great majority will not even vote for their local politicians and can't even name them besides governor and mayor (try it: name your state legislators and judges). EDIT: How many reading this would serve if called for jury or grand jury duty? Finally, the political elite behave the same all over the country. That's either a massive coincidence of bad apples or it's a systematic problem. Most people reading this would (and some probably do) behave the same in those situations. "We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo (Walt Kelly)

vezzy-fnord 12y ago
I've always found this argument from voter apathy to be unpersuasive and arrogant. The voting system in the United States is rather uniquely damaged with its first-past-the-post (majoritarian) elections, over a century's worth of gerrymandering that goes on strong as ever, stringent ballot access laws, public debate restrictions (which I take became stronger after Ross Perot) and so on. It has all been meticulously crafted so that the odds are against any form of profound change, but rather to enforce the party dichotomy and have representatives maintain a comfortable status quo. The aforementioned gerrymandering strongly encourages vehement and almost parade-like, but ultimately empty and financially wasteful political campaigns, along with focusing one's efforts on leaving an impression only in certain key states and districts that are really decisive to one's performance. Yet even people who are well versed in statistics and probability often seem to grant an exception for the insanity of voting in the United States, out of a perverse democratic ideal that ultimately isn't really there. Without some truly disruptive changes to how elections are structured (hardly a trivial matter, what with the rather fundamental chilling effect they'd have on how people have been doing things for so long), I personally find voting to be not worth one's time.
- waqf 12y ago

harshreality 12y ago

A few other points: - Common law vs Civil law... reliance more on legal precedent than on codified laws makes the legal field unnecessarily complex. If common-law defenses or other considerations are not included in the plain text of codified laws, the codified laws need to be fixed. - Adversarial system vs inquisitional system. These need not be disjoint. Some sort of hybrid where the judge (and jury) can ask pointed questions of witnesses, or ask for elaboration on some point a lawyer is making, seems prudent. That's not to say the adversarial system is entirely bad. The notion, at least in civil cases, and for the defense in criminal cases, that the parties need their own dedicated advocate, is certainly valuable. - Too many laws. The externalities of creating more and more laws seem lost on legislators (figuratively speaking; not truly lost, but ignored, since it ensures job security for lawyers). - Reform of the incentives for prosecutors. The objective should not be to win cases, but to serve the public interest. Criminal prosecutions should not really have dedicated advocates intent on trying to convict the defendant, but that's what prosecutors in the United States usually are. Rating prosecutors by conviction rates is absurd unless you've already decided that every defendant is guilty.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> Rating prosecutors by conviction rates is absurd unless you've already decided that every defendant is guilty. Untrue. Its also reasonable if you assume that the legal system outside of the prosecutor works perfectly, and therefore, independent of the prosecutors actions, no innocent defendant will be convicted. With that assumption, a high conviction rate means that the prosecutor is serving the public interest by not charging the innocent. Of course, reality deviates from this in a number of ways, most critically in the high rate of plea bargains and the lack of evidence testing in the case of plea bargains.
- corndoge 12y ago
  In other words...you've already decided that every defendant is guilty. "A defendant is a person or entity accused of a crime in criminal prosecution or a person or entity against whom some type of civil relief is being sought in a civil case." [0] I wouldn't say what he said is untrue, you're just refuting his statement based on the definition of a defendant (whether a defendant is someone charged with a crime vs being prosecuted against). Sounds like you have different definitions that lead to slightly different relations of the same situation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defendant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defendant