[dijit]

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.

[jakelazaroff]

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.

[blackqueeriroh]

> 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?

[dijit]

You've cited a 2-25% range. That's enormous. The low end supports my position, the high end would be catastrophic. Where's your source for 25%?

Here's mine for the low end: a study examining attorney perspectives on plea bargaining https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6368263/ and multiple sources citing 2-8% of felony guilty pleas involve innocent https://testif-i.com/issues/plea-bargains/ https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/12/26/plea-bargainin...

At 2%, that's 98% guilty - which is what I meant by "vast majority." If you're claiming 25%, prove it.

[lurk2]

> 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.

[dijit]

Yeah, I adjusted my comment to better reflect the parents comment, I was getting muddled in all the replies.

Apologies.

[Dylan16807]

> The burden

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".

[dijit]

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.

[Dylan16807]

> No, I don't have burden of proof for defending the status quo. That's not how this works.

Are you trying to win a formal debate or have a productive discussion?

Status quo is a starting point but still needs evidence.

> 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.

Define "unjust".

If someone says it's unfairly biased most of the time, I don't think that's an extraordinary claim.

If someone says it's getting the wrong answer most of the time, yeah that's extraordinary claim, but nobody made that claim.

[dijit]

I'm having a productive discussion by not letting vague claims slide.

"Unfairly biased most of the time" and "unjust more often than just" are the same claim when discussing legal outcomes. If the system is systematically biased, it produces unjust outcomes. Don't play word games.

And yes, people absolutely have made that claim. The assertion that 98% plea bargain rates represent coercion rather than efficient processing is precisely claiming the system gets it wrong most of the time. The hypothetical about innocent breadwinners forced to plead guilty isn't describing an edge case, it's being presented as how plea bargains function.

If you want to argue the system has some biases that need addressing, fine. That's not what's being argued here. The argument is that plea bargains are inherently coercive and that maintaining innocence should exempt you from parole requirements. That's claiming the system is fundamentally broken, not merely imperfect.

Pick one: is the system broken or just imperfect? Because I'm arguing it's the latter and you lot keep trying to prove the former whilst pretending you're not.

[Dylan16807]

> "Unfairly biased most of the time" and "unjust more often than just" are the same claim when discussing legal outcomes. If the system is systematically biased, it produces unjust outcomes. Don't play word games.

Then that's not an extraordinary claim.

I'm doing my best to avoid word games here.

If someone is claiming that the system is biased always, but not claiming that most outcomes are wrong, that is a reasonable claim.

Calling plea bargains inherently coercive is a reasonable claim. Yes they're broken in some ways.

> The assertion that 98% plea bargain rates represent coercion rather than efficient processing is precisely claiming the system gets it wrong most of the time.

No no no no no no no no. That's not what those words mean.

> Pick one: is the system broken or just imperfect?

Some imperfection will always be there.

But there are important imperfections that could be reasonably fixed, therefore I would say the system is broken. By my definition of broken; yours might be different.

I don't know what "fundamentally broken" means exactly so I won't comment on that term.

[dijit]

Fair enough, let me step back because I'm getting angry.

You're right that "biased in process" and "wrong outcomes" aren't the same thing. A system can have unfair disparities (wealth based, racial, whatever) without necessarily convicting innocent people at scale. That's a reasonable distinction.

But that's not what sparked this thread. Go back to the top: the original claim was "when is the law just in its application?" implying never or nearly never. My position is that it's just more often than not. That's the disagreement.

If you're saying the system has procedural problems that create unfair pressure but generally reaches correct guilty/not guilty determinations, then we probably don't disagree much. That's a claim about needing reforms, not about fundamental systemic failure.

The issue is when people use "98% plea bargains" or "inherently coercive" to argue the system is fundamentally broken. If that's not what you're arguing, then we're likely closer to agreement than it seemed.

[Lerc]

>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.

[dijit]

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."