There's a reason that due process is a thing, it's more commonly upheld than it's not, no matter what rhetoric you've been spun by a fear-mongering media.
If you plead guilty to an offence you shouldn't serve the same amount of time as someone who shows no remorse.
Also, included in those "plea bargains" are cautions, for children.
edit; I'm getting flagged but I should definitely mention that I'm intimately familiar with how the law can be for the underclass, I was an underclass and I have a laundry list of a criminal record from when I was a child.
People plead guilty because they can't afford the $10K in lawyer costs, and if you can't afford a lawyer and get appointed a state one, not only are you far more likely to lose your case, but if you lose you still have to pay that lawyer at the end plus the extra court costs and fees on top.
Often people are given "If you plea, you will pay a few thousand dollars and get to go home. If you don't plea, there is a 50% chance you go to jail, have a black mark on your record, and have to pay $10K in court fees and fines." And when people aren't even sure how they will pay a few thousand dollars, the risk of having to pay $10K+ plus serve jail time that will cost them their job and limit future employment opportunities is a HUGE risk.
You are the breadwinner for your household. A detective decides that you are the most likely person to have committed a nearby burglary. You have an alibi, but they charge you anyway. You cannot afford to pay bail; your options are to remain in jail until the case makes its way through the courts, or to accept a plea bargain that lets you out on probation. Your underfunded and overworked public defender advises you to take the deal, since a trial would be ruinous even if you do prevail. What do you do?
The issue with plea bargains is not that guilty people are given leniency for remorse; it is that they are used to coerce innocent people into confessing to a crime they did not commit.
In 98% of cases they bring for prosecution - they know the job, they know what works, and if they don't think they can follow through, they often just drop the case entirely, so it doesn't count.
Anyone who says "all of x is justified" or "all of y is unjustified" is usually wrong.
I thought we were smart enough to realise that on HackerNews.
Parent of mine claimed that the law as practiced is unjust, I said, largely that's not true and that there's a pretty strong propaganda campaign against the legal system (due to aligned incentives of stoking up rage for clicks).
I didn't claim that unfairness didn't exist, merely that it's not the default.
I have now been told that because plea bargains exist for those who show remorse, that the law never follows due process.
> If you plead guilty to an offence you shouldn't serve the same amount of time as someone who shows no remorse.
On the contrary, I think that's one of the problems that makes plea bargains so egregious: in order to take a plea bargain, you have to plead guilty, which prevents you from further defending yourself if you didn't actually do what you were accused of. That creates the scenario where an innocent person who is not confident in the system's ability to defend them may find themselves having to plead guilty in order to stave off a much worse penalty.
The same thing applies to parole boards: maintaining innocence typically prevents you from being granted parole.
You're conflating "plea bargains exist" with "innocent people are systematically coerced into false confessions."
The vast majority of plea bargains involve people who are, in fact, guilty and are receiving a reduced sentence for saving the court's time and showing contrition. That's not a perverse incentive, it's a reasonable tradeoff that benefits both the defendant and society.
Yes, edge cases exist where innocent people feel pressure to plead. But the existence of edge cases doesn't prove the system is fundamentally unjust, it proves the system is imperfect, which no one disputes.
Regarding parole: maintaining innocence after you've been convicted and exhausted your appeals isn't "defending yourself"; at that point, you've had your defence. The parole board's job is to assess rehabilitation, and refusing to acknowledge your crime is evidence you haven't been rehabilitated. If you genuinely didn't do it, your remedy is post-conviction relief, not parole.
The burden is on those claiming systemic injustice to show that false guilty pleas are the norm rather than the exception. "98% plea bargain rate" doesn't demonstrate that.
I realize that "duress" probably has a specific legal definition, but colloquially speaking all plea bargains are made under duress. If I (a private citizen) kidnapped you, locked you in a cage and told you that I would continue to hold you captive if you didn't agree to my terms, no one would mistake that for a free or fair negotiation.
> The vast majority of plea bargains involve people who are, in fact, guilty and are receiving a reduced sentence for saving the court's time and showing contrition. That's not a perverse incentive, it's a reasonable tradeoff that benefits both the defendant and society.
What proof do you have of this? Estimates I’ve read range from 2-25% of people who accept plea bargains are innocent.
And what recent age of innocent people is it acceptable to send to jail via coercive plea bargains to ensure no guilty people go free?
> If you take a plea deal because you were convinced you'd be prosecuted otherwise, well, that also sucks
You are completely sidestepping the thrust of the grandparent commenter’s comment, which is that the cost of defending yourself from prosecution is prohibitively expensive and punitive in the sense that the outcome is worse than negotiating a plea deal.
> if you took one under duress, then that would be why the higher courts exist, to invalidate your guilty plea when taken under duress.
In this hypothetical the accused doesn’t have the money to pay for a lawyer; they aren’t going to be beating the case on an appeal.
You're defending zealously enough, and introducing so many variables yourself, that you have burden of proof too. Show some numbers for "vast majority" and "edge case".
No, I don't have burden of proof for defending the status quo. That's not how this works.
The legal system processes millions of cases annually. The claim being made here is that it's unjust more often than just... that's an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
I'm not the one who needs to prove the system works. You need to prove it's fundamentally broken. "Plea bargains could coerce innocent people" isn't evidence, it's a handful of cases in millions and heavy speculation about prevalence. I've taken a caution myself when I thought I might prevail at trial, not because I was coerced into a false confession, but because the pragmatic choice was obvious. That's the system working, not breaking.
The Innocence Project has exonerated about 375 people via DNA evidence since 1989. Tragic? Absolutely. Evidence of systemic failure? Do your own fucking maths. That's 375 cases over 35 years in a system processing roughly 20 million criminal cases annually. Even if we're generous and assume there are 10x more wrongful convictions that haven't been discovered, we're still talking about a fraction of a percent.
Show me data demonstrating that false guilty pleas represent anything more than edge cases, or accept that the system, whilst imperfect, generally functions.
The burden is squarely on those claiming otherwise.
>In the eyes of the law, if you have been found guilty "you are guilty".
Yes but this is just another way to describe the problem, invoking it as a justification becomes tautological.
The patent office has a similar issue where they tend to consider prior work to be just what they see in other patents so the first person to patent is declared to be the first person to express the idea. To turn that view from the default position takes a lot of resources.
Laws should be unambiguous, but they shouldn't achieve this simply by defining the resolution of the ambiguity to be different from reality.
You've misunderstood the point I was making. I'm not claiming legal findings are objectively true in some metaphysical sense, I'm saying that for a legal system to function, there must be finality to proceedings.
The alternative is what, exactly? Perpetual relitigation? Every convicted person maintains their innocence indefinitely and the system just... accepts that as equally valid to the jury's verdict?
We have mechanisms for when the system gets it wrong: appeals, post-conviction relief, habeas corpus. These exist precisely because we recognise legal findings aren't infallible. But the burden is on the convicted to demonstrate error... and rightly so, because the alternative is paralysis.
Your patent office analogy inadvertently supports my point: yes, there are edge cases where prior art is missed. But the solution isn't to abolish patent finality, it's to have robust review mechanisms, which we do.
The claim upthread is that the system is unjust more often than just. That's a far stronger claim than "the system sometimes gets it wrong."
If you go to trial you are saying you are not guilty of the offence.
If you are not guilty the ideally you are acquitted.
if you are guilty, you’re hoping to get away with it.
I struggle to see how hoping to get away with it, is showing remorse. If anything I certainly think it says that it shows little or no remorse, since you believe that other people should receive no justice for crimes that you committed against them.
I'm not saying it doesn't logically follow, I'm saying it shouldn't legally follow. Exercising your legal rights should never have negative legal consequences.
Consider pleading the fifth. You can't be compelled to incriminate yourself. That doesn't just mean they can't coerce a confession out of you. It also means that the law does not infer guilt from a refusal to testify, even though logically a person who refuses to testify is more likely to be guilty than one who testifies freely in their own defense. If you couldn't be compelled to testify, but at the same time your refusal could be considered evidence of guilt, then you don't really have the right not to testify.
Same sort of thing here. If exercising your right to a trial increases your penalty then in what sense do you actually have that right? To put it in starker terms, imagine if people who previously spoke critically of the President were given a harsher penalty than those who spoke positively. That's a clear free speech violation. If exercising your free speech rights can't increase your penalty, exercising your right to a trial shouldn't either.
I understand the constitutional point you're making, but I think we're conflating two things: exercising your right to trial, and showing remorse for what you did.
The right to trial isn't being penalised. You get a fair trial either way. What's being rewarded is accepting responsibility and saving the court's time. That's not the same as punishing you for exercising a right.
I'll grant that when the sentencing gap is extreme, the distinction becomes academic. If you're facing 20 years at trial versus 2 for pleading, then functionally you're being coerced regardless of the theoretical justification.
But in principle, rewarding people who show remorse is part of justice. Someone who accepts what they did and shows contrition is different from someone who forces the state to prove its case. Both have the right to trial, but treating them differently at sentencing isn't inherently unjust.
The question is whether the gap has become so large that it's effectively coercive. That's an empirical question about how plea bargains operate in practice, not a constitutional one about whether they can exist at all, which, if I understood it right, is your position.
> If you plead guilty to an offence you shouldn't serve the same amount of time as someone who shows no remorse.
Showing remorse is good, yes, but holding that over someone's head as a way to force them to plead guilty is disgusting.
Also pleading guilty does not imply showing remorse.
If we can't disentangle plea and remorse, then factoring remorse into the sentence does more harm than good. It would be better to ignore it entirely and pretend everyone said they're deeply sorry.
The point is we don't really know who is innocent or not, because the incentives are so fucked. If you're poor and need to get on with your life, you take the guilty plee almost every time. Trial takes fucking forever, and it's very expensive.
What this means is the you can be charged with almost anything, and the odds are very high you will plea guilty, regardless of your innocence. There's basically no incentive for the police or prosecutors to show any restraint, they have a "get out of jail free" card in the form of plea bargains.
Let me make up a number. 7%. I think that number of plea bargains would be a huge problem if in 7% of cases the person is in fact innocent. Would you disagree?
And even generally assuming guilt, a number that high gets worrying. Maybe we're only prosecuting the strongest of strong cases or something, but some of the other factors that could be reducing the rate of trials are really bad for justice.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...