8 ms·

Looking at the other side of the coin, perhaps also worth asking (even if the answer is a negative): Given what we know about the coercive nature of the plea s

by swombat 11y ago

Looking at the other side of the coin, perhaps also worth asking (even if the answer is a negative): Given what we know about the coercive nature of the plea system in the US, which frequently forces people to plead guilty even when they're innocent, to avoid a very expensive, long, and likely "unhappy-ending" trial, is it possible that these FBI agents are actually innocent and simply being coerced into filing guilty pleas to turn 20 year sentences into 5 year sentences? I mean, this is almost a banana republic we're talking about here after all. What was the percentage of people putting in guilty pleas who are innocent? I can't find the article but I recall it was quite high. If we apply this line of thinking to people we like, we should also apply it to people we don't like.

martin1975 11y ago
Would you be coerced to plea guilty knowing you were innocent?
- swombat 11y ago
  Apparently that's very common in the US. Innocence is certainly no guarantee you'll win in the US criminal court system.
- Sacho 11y ago
  Absolutely. Litigation is ruinously expensive and prosecutors have an almost flawless conviction rate. When you're placed in such a shitty situation where you get the choice of ruining your life a little and ruining your life a lot(and possibly your family and friends' lives as they try to help you along), it's not as cut and dry as "would you plead guilty knowing you were innocent". People do this every day. It's why prosecutors pile charges on, and it works.
  - true_religion 11y ago
    > prosecutors have an almost flawless conviction rate. This is because anytime there is an absolute chance they'll lose, they drop the case. And if the case is less than a 100% guaranteed slam dunk, they'll ask for a plea so it'll never go to trial. Prosecutors cherry pick their trials. It's not possible for every prosecutor everywhere to keep a 98%+ average trial conviction rate in a normal system.
    - Tomte 11y ago
      Sounds like sensible and desirable behaviour to me. You might even call it "normal". Edit: I'd really like to see how all the downvoters would like to defend their stance. It's obvious that prosecutorial misconduct is not happening when prosecutors abandon cases that are marginal, but when they are harassing people they don't have a chance of getting convicted.
      - ifdefdebug 11y ago
        Well I didn't downvote you, but: "Desirable behaviour" would be for a prosecutor to seek truth, not conviction. That's what I would call "normal". And guess what: there are countries in this world where prosecutors think like that: they are glad to drop charges as soon as they see someone's innocent.
        Tomte 11y ago
        That's exactly what I've written. Unless you want to assume that the court is so broken, it will willy-nilly convict innocents. But then it doesn't matter much what the prosecutor does, then the justice system is utterly broken.
        jessaustin 11y ago
        You don't have to assume; paying attention would suffice. Racial disparities, emphasis on victimless crime, asset forfeiture, prison overcrowding, and oh, the fact that USA has a much higher incarceration rate than any comparable polity ever in the history of the human race.
        rayiner 11y ago
        A justice system is broken when people break the rules and subvert the intent of the system. But most of what you're pointing to is, instead, conscious policy choices. E.g. a society is generally entitled to criminalize activities it does not want people to engage in. That some other people may perceive the crimes as "victimless" is neither here nor there. I'd imagine that very few people convicted of drug crimes are not in fact guilty of those crimes, because the evidence in those cases is usually overwhelming (e.g. caught with physical product in hand). Similarly, the U.S. has had about 5-10x the murder rate of, say, the U.K., going back probably a century or more, long before the recent rise in incarceration rate. So the fact that the U.S. has a high incarceration rate does not by itself mean that innocent people are being put in prison.
- Riseed 11y ago
  If you're innocent, by the time you get to pleading, the system has already proven to you that it doesn't work. Even assuming no misbehavior (e.g. planted evidence), the police found you guilty enough to investigate, a judge found you guilty enough to arrest, and a prosecutor found you guilty enough to charge. Why would you gamble and dare think the trial in such a system would work any better?
- hueving 11y ago
  Yes, that's the whole issue. Many times people are offered deals that look better than the ridiculous sentences they will get if they happen to lose. If you don't have a strong alibi, it's tempting to take the deal.
- gambiting 11y ago
  There was an article on HN recently about a young man who spent nearly a year in jail, waiting for trial. Basically the prosecutor came to him,said "look, you can plead guilty, they will give you a 1 year sentence, take into account that you've been here for a year, you will be released and home within a week. Or, you can go to trial, which can go for months, and then you might end up with a 3-5 year long sentence". What would you do in this situation? Even if he was completely innocent, the temptation to go home right now, to end the nightmare, must be absolutely huge. I can only guess that there are thousands of people like this in US.
- pessimizer 11y ago
  I have been. The prosecutor knew I was innocent too, but didn't care. It was a choice between paying court costs and having a suspended sentence hanging above my head, or potentially getting 3 years in prison. As a black 19 year-old in a white court in Arkansas, the smart choice was obvious.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    That's totally disgusting.
hluska 11y ago
It's definitely very possible, though I have two cautions. 1) Police do not take investigating their own lightly and thus most likely have very strong evidence. 2) I don't know the details of these fellows' careers, but presumably they know procedure, know good defense attorneys and would be far more capable of assisting in their own defense than the average citizen.
pmorici 11y ago
The evidence is pretty damming. There are emails that various Bitcoin companies have released publicly showing how these two agents tried to extort them. The way the investigation started to begin with is because they were reported to the authorities by an exchange for acting shady that links them to the transactions in the blockchain and the block chain doesn't lie.
- juliangregorian 11y ago
  Hey, if it gets crooked cops booked that's one of the best arguments for Bitcoin that I know of.
pvg 11y ago
Hang on, what is the evidence you have we're talking about a 'banana republic' or that the people who plead to stealing bitcoin did not, in fact, steal bitcoin but I don't know, did something else that involves not-stealing bitcoin? What is your plausible alternative theory of 'some bad actors stole bitcoin'?
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  Chinese purchase real estate in the US because of the strength of the rule of law. The US borrows money at low rates because investors know it will be paid back. Swombat thinks American is a banana republic because he can't see past his own hate.
  - pc86 11y ago
    I have literally no idea what you're talking about.
rayiner 11y ago
I assume the number you're referring to is from Judge Jed S. Rakoff's editorial: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-innocent-people-plead-guilty http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-inn... ("How prevalent is the phenomenon of innocent people pleading guilty? The few criminologists who have thus far investigated the phenomenon estimate that the overall rate for convicted felons as a whole is between 2 percent and 8 percent...") So between 92% and 98% of the time, plea bargaining gets things right. The "beyond a reasonable doubt" jury trial standard is unlikely to be more than 95% and is in practice probably 90% or lower: http://federaltaxcrimes.blogspot.com/2014/09/proof-beyond-reasonable-doubt-ramblings.html http://federaltaxcrimes.blogspot.com/2014/09/proof-beyond-re.... So if the 2-8% error rate is correct, it's not clear that plea bargaining leads to more innocent people being convicted than jury trials. Moreover, it's unclear to me that you can do much better than 90-95% accuracy. Say you set the threshold at 99.9%, only convicting when the proof is overwhelming. What would be your rate of false negatives (i.e. where you let a guilty person go)? And how would society react to that? There's a false negative rate beyond which people will push back on the court system as being too lenient on the accused. You can already see this in areas of the law where proof is difficult. For example, I think the crazy administrative proceedings for rape cases in college campuses arose, in part, because of the difficulty of holding guilty people accountable in the court system.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  How does that rate of between 2 and 8% innocents jailed compare to other countries? It would seem to be terribly high, if you take the number of people in jail in the USA as an input and you work out the numbers that comes down to 2% of 2.3M which is 46,000 and 8% of 2.3M which is 184,000!
  - rayiner 11y ago
    I'd be curious to see those numbers. I'd imagine the U.S. justice system is far more widely studied than that of other countries.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
rip747 11y ago
It kills me that our legal system is like this. You should never has to "give in" simply because you face a harsher sentence if you exercise your right to defend yourself. I don't see why our justice system simply lowers sentences or fine individuals rather than tacking on ridiculous sentences.
fredgrott 11y ago
their trial was delayed so that the Silk Road trial defendant could not have counterpoint to offer in defense..seems like that move points towards that the fed gov thought agent was guilty

by swombat 11y ago

martin1975 11y ago

Would you be coerced to plea guilty knowing you were innocent?

swombat 11y ago
Apparently that's very common in the US. Innocence is certainly no guarantee you'll win in the US criminal court system.
Sacho 11y ago
Absolutely. Litigation is ruinously expensive and prosecutors have an almost flawless conviction rate. When you're placed in such a shitty situation where you get the choice of ruining your life a little and ruining your life a lot(and possibly your family and friends' lives as they try to help you along), it's not as cut and dry as "would you plead guilty knowing you were innocent". People do this every day. It's why prosecutors pile charges on, and it works.
- true_religion 11y ago
  > prosecutors have an almost flawless conviction rate. This is because anytime there is an absolute chance they'll lose, they drop the case. And if the case is less than a 100% guaranteed slam dunk, they'll ask for a plea so it'll never go to trial. Prosecutors cherry pick their trials. It's not possible for every prosecutor everywhere to keep a 98%+ average trial conviction rate in a normal system.
  - Tomte 11y ago
    Sounds like sensible and desirable behaviour to me. You might even call it "normal". Edit: I'd really like to see how all the downvoters would like to defend their stance. It's obvious that prosecutorial misconduct is not happening when prosecutors abandon cases that are marginal, but when they are harassing people they don't have a chance of getting convicted.
    - ifdefdebug 11y ago
      Well I didn't downvote you, but: "Desirable behaviour" would be for a prosecutor to seek truth, not conviction. That's what I would call "normal". And guess what: there are countries in this world where prosecutors think like that: they are glad to drop charges as soon as they see someone's innocent.
      - Tomte 11y ago
        That's exactly what I've written. Unless you want to assume that the court is so broken, it will willy-nilly convict innocents. But then it doesn't matter much what the prosecutor does, then the justice system is utterly broken.
        jessaustin 11y ago
        You don't have to assume; paying attention would suffice. Racial disparities, emphasis on victimless crime, asset forfeiture, prison overcrowding, and oh, the fact that USA has a much higher incarceration rate than any comparable polity ever in the history of the human race.
        rayiner 11y ago
        A justice system is broken when people break the rules and subvert the intent of the system. But most of what you're pointing to is, instead, conscious policy choices. E.g. a society is generally entitled to criminalize activities it does not want people to engage in. That some other people may perceive the crimes as "victimless" is neither here nor there. I'd imagine that very few people convicted of drug crimes are not in fact guilty of those crimes, because the evidence in those cases is usually overwhelming (e.g. caught with physical product in hand). Similarly, the U.S. has had about 5-10x the murder rate of, say, the U.K., going back probably a century or more, long before the recent rise in incarceration rate. So the fact that the U.S. has a high incarceration rate does not by itself mean that innocent people are being put in prison.
Riseed 11y ago
If you're innocent, by the time you get to pleading, the system has already proven to you that it doesn't work. Even assuming no misbehavior (e.g. planted evidence), the police found you guilty enough to investigate, a judge found you guilty enough to arrest, and a prosecutor found you guilty enough to charge. Why would you gamble and dare think the trial in such a system would work any better?
hueving 11y ago
Yes, that's the whole issue. Many times people are offered deals that look better than the ridiculous sentences they will get if they happen to lose. If you don't have a strong alibi, it's tempting to take the deal.
gambiting 11y ago
There was an article on HN recently about a young man who spent nearly a year in jail, waiting for trial. Basically the prosecutor came to him,said "look, you can plead guilty, they will give you a 1 year sentence, take into account that you've been here for a year, you will be released and home within a week. Or, you can go to trial, which can go for months, and then you might end up with a 3-5 year long sentence". What would you do in this situation? Even if he was completely innocent, the temptation to go home right now, to end the nightmare, must be absolutely huge. I can only guess that there are thousands of people like this in US.
pessimizer 11y ago
I have been. The prosecutor knew I was innocent too, but didn't care. It was a choice between paying court costs and having a suspended sentence hanging above my head, or potentially getting 3 years in prison. As a black 19 year-old in a white court in Arkansas, the smart choice was obvious.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  That's totally disgusting.

hluska 11y ago

It's definitely very possible, though I have two cautions. 1) Police do not take investigating their own lightly and thus most likely have very strong evidence. 2) I don't know the details of these fellows' careers, but presumably they know procedure, know good defense attorneys and would be far more capable of assisting in their own defense than the average citizen.

pmorici 11y ago

The evidence is pretty damming. There are emails that various Bitcoin companies have released publicly showing how these two agents tried to extort them. The way the investigation started to begin with is because they were reported to the authorities by an exchange for acting shady that links them to the transactions in the blockchain and the block chain doesn't lie.

juliangregorian 11y ago
Hey, if it gets crooked cops booked that's one of the best arguments for Bitcoin that I know of.

pvg 11y ago

Hang on, what is the evidence you have we're talking about a 'banana republic' or that the people who plead to stealing bitcoin did not, in fact, steal bitcoin but I don't know, did something else that involves not-stealing bitcoin? What is your plausible alternative theory of 'some bad actors stole bitcoin'?

happyscrappy 11y ago
Chinese purchase real estate in the US because of the strength of the rule of law. The US borrows money at low rates because investors know it will be paid back. Swombat thinks American is a banana republic because he can't see past his own hate.
- pc86 11y ago
  I have literally no idea what you're talking about.

rayiner 11y ago

I assume the number you're referring to is from Judge Jed S. Rakoff's editorial: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-innocent-people-plead-guilty http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-inn... ("How prevalent is the phenomenon of innocent people pleading guilty? The few criminologists who have thus far investigated the phenomenon estimate that the overall rate for convicted felons as a whole is between 2 percent and 8 percent...") So between 92% and 98% of the time, plea bargaining gets things right. The "beyond a reasonable doubt" jury trial standard is unlikely to be more than 95% and is in practice probably 90% or lower: http://federaltaxcrimes.blogspot.com/2014/09/proof-beyond-reasonable-doubt-ramblings.html http://federaltaxcrimes.blogspot.com/2014/09/proof-beyond-re.... So if the 2-8% error rate is correct, it's not clear that plea bargaining leads to more innocent people being convicted than jury trials. Moreover, it's unclear to me that you can do much better than 90-95% accuracy. Say you set the threshold at 99.9%, only convicting when the proof is overwhelming. What would be your rate of false negatives (i.e. where you let a guilty person go)? And how would society react to that? There's a false negative rate beyond which people will push back on the court system as being too lenient on the accused. You can already see this in areas of the law where proof is difficult. For example, I think the crazy administrative proceedings for rape cases in college campuses arose, in part, because of the difficulty of holding guilty people accountable in the court system.

jacquesm 11y ago
How does that rate of between 2 and 8% innocents jailed compare to other countries? It would seem to be terribly high, if you take the number of people in jail in the USA as an input and you work out the numbers that comes down to 2% of 2.3M which is 46,000 and 8% of 2.3M which is 184,000!
- rayiner 11y ago
  I'd be curious to see those numbers. I'd imagine the U.S. justice system is far more widely studied than that of other countries.
  - jacquesm 11y ago

rip747 11y ago

It kills me that our legal system is like this. You should never has to "give in" simply because you face a harsher sentence if you exercise your right to defend yourself. I don't see why our justice system simply lowers sentences or fine individuals rather than tacking on ridiculous sentences.

fredgrott 11y ago

their trial was delayed so that the Silk Road trial defendant could not have counterpoint to offer in defense..seems like that move points towards that the fed gov thought agent was guilty