[xfitm3]

"Guilty pleas have replaced trials for a very simple reason: individuals who choose to exercise their Sixth Amendment right to trial face exponentially higher sentences if they invoke the right to trial and lose. Faced with this choice, individuals almost uniformly surrender the right to trial rather than insist on proof beyond a reasonable doubt, defense lawyers spend most of their time negotiating guilty pleas rather than ensuring that police and the government respect the boundaries of the law including the proof beyond a reasonable doubt standard, and judges dedicate their time to administering plea allocutions rather than evaluating the constitutional and legal aspects of the government’s case and police conduct. Equally important, the public rarely exercises the oversight function envisioned by the Framers and inherent in jury service."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2018/07/31/are-inno...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/plea-ba...

[heydonovan]

Plea bargaining makes innocent people admit to things they didn't do. Given the choice to plead guilty and receive 30 days in jail vs taking a chance in court at the risk of 3 years in jail, which would you take? Not to mention the insane costs of hiring a lawyer, which only wealthy people can afford. With the current trend of "guilty until proven innocent", it's no wonder folks take this approach.

[blfr]

And how does it relate to brutality on Rikers Island? What is the relevance to the OP?

[CamTin]

If you do elect for a trial, you are going to be waiting for a long time (on Rikers), because the system is overloaded and isn't actually provisioned to provide justice for the volume of people forced through it. This is the same reason that prosecutors are pressured to plead everyone out and public defenders are pressured to take those deals.

It's easy to score public dollars to hire cops and build prisons, but it's much harder to add judges, public defenders, clerks, and courtrooms. The result is more people with a right to a trial than we have the capacity to give a trial. Justice is therefore a scarce good and must be rationed by some means: you can either queue (wait in jail), pay in cash (by hiring private representation and making cash bail), or roll the dice and go to trial with a public defender.

The solution isn't to find another way to ration justice, it's to reduce the imbalance between people with rights to a trial and the number of trials we can provide. We can do this by arresting fewer people by, for example, ending the war on drugs (among other things) or by expanding the number of judges, clerks, and public defenders in our justice system to be able to handle the whole load. Maybe both are needed in some measure.

[kwhitefoot]

Does any other country have a system like plea bargaining? I mean officially sanctioned and on something like the same scale.

> easy to score public dollars to hire cops and build prisons, but it's much harder to add judges, public defenders, clerks, and courtrooms

If other countries do not have plea bargaining then how does this economic argument work in the US but , apparently, not elsewhere.

I ask this because I get the impression that the US is the only country that has an official plea bargaining system.