[AnthonyMouse]

> The reality is that most people who become subject to criminal prosecution are guilty. The reason can often be attributed to overbroad laws, but that still means you are guilty and will likely lose your criminal case.

Let's unpack this.

The first assertion is that most people who get prosecuted are guilty. This is assuming the conclusion -- the whole question is whether the system is getting it wrong. The presence of convictions can't be used to prove the absence of false convictions. The presence of more convictions increases the probability of more false convictions. And if we had a reliable way to know the real truth then none of this would be a problem to begin with.

The second is the implication that they're all guilty because there are so many overbroad laws that actually everybody is guilty. But that's just a description of a mechanism by which the system convicts "innocent people", i.e. ordinary people who never had any intention of committing a crime. Making so many things illegal that following every law is beyond human ability and anyone can be convicted at the government's discretion is the thing people are objecting to.

[arcbyte]

I'm agreeing with the comment you originally responded to about the statistic being misleading because it is an almost self-evident truth that prosecutors ultimately expend their limited resources on the cases they are most sure of the defendant's culpability based on the evidence.

You countered about plea deals being coercive because the plea deal is generally much lower than the maximum or even average sentence of people who go on to be found guilty and ultimately sentenced after a trial on the merits.

I then countered that people who ultimately "become subject" are generally guilty and therefore the coerciveness, if you accept it as such, doesn't really matter.

I'll concede two things: 1. "become subject" is doing a lot of work there. What I meant is people who the state ultimately chooses to prosecute. There are plenty of people who are arrested and ultimately not charged for various reasons. So my assertion is really that if the state ultimately chooses to proceed with prosecuting someone, they have some evidence that a crime has happened and that you are connected to it in some way that implies some degree of culpability. 2. My definition of "the system" is just the adversarial trial of evidence in front of an adjudicator. I would not include the laws or legislative system in that, although it is obviously related and we both hate that.

So my whole point is really to say that because of overbroad laws, it really is more likely than not that a prosecutor can find a law for which there is evidence that you are guilty of breaking it. Hence, plea deals existing or not, you would have been found guilty in court, and therefore my assertion from personal experience is that most people who the state ultimately chooses to prosecute are guilty and plea deals are not the terrible coercive force on innocent people you claim it is.

[AnthonyMouse]

> You countered about plea deals being coercive because the plea deal is generally much lower than the maximum or even average sentence of people who go on to be found guilty and ultimately sentenced after a trial on the merits.

The point of which is to say that even if the majority of people charged were guilty, that should not be expected to extend to the people who demand a trial, because the system severely penalizes anyone who does that and is then convicted. Which implies that only the people who believe they have a high probability of being acquitted, e.g. the subset of the accused who know they didn't do it, have the incentive to demand a trial. And yet > 90% of those people are convicted, which seems suspicious.

> I then countered that people who ultimately "become subject" are generally guilty and therefore the coerciveness, if you accept it as such, doesn't really matter.

It matters both to the falsely accused (who can be a minority of the accused while still being a large number of people), who face that coercive pressure since the probability of being falsely convicted after demanding a trial is non-zero, and because it acts as a filtering mechanism on who demands a trial and consequently makes the trial statistics peculiar, which was the original point.

> So my assertion is really that if the state ultimately chooses to proceed with prosecuting someone, they have some evidence that a crime has happened and that you are connected to it in some way that implies some degree of culpability.

This seems like a fair assertion in most cases, but it also leaves room for a lot of trouble.

Suppose an iPad is stolen and someone is spotted on camera just outside the scene of the crime carrying an iPad. It happens that they didn't do it, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time carrying a different iPad than the one that was stolen. But the actual perpetrator wasn't caught on camera so the footage turns them into the prime suspect and their apartment gets searched.

The police don't find the stolen iPad but they do find a high precision scale, which he says is used for cooking, and a bottle of pills prescribed to his ex, which he says he didn't know was there. These explanations seem plausible enough that you might not want to charge them on their own, but the drug possession is technically illegal if he actually knew they were there.

Meanwhile he keeps insisting he didn't steal anything, but there he is on the camera and there are no other suspects. So he gets offered a deal, and then charged for the drugs and "drug paraphernalia" as the penalty for refusing it. Which he then gets convicted of because the requirement to prove that somebody knew they were in possession of something that someone else left behind is the sort of thing the system tends to forget about or work around since actually proving it such an inconvenience.

So now he's getting a conviction whether he pleads guilty to the false charge or not. If he really didn't know about the bottle of pills then none of the charges are true, and if he did it still rings of an injustice when the only reason he was charged with that is the refusal to plead guilty to the thing he was innocent of.

> Hence, plea deals existing or not, you would have been found guilty in court, and therefore my assertion from personal experience is that most people who the state ultimately chooses to prosecute are guilty and plea deals are not the terrible coercive force on innocent people you claim it is.

It seems like there are two alternatives here.

Either your claim is that there are no innocent people because there is always something anyone can legitimately be charged with, in which case the entire system is a sham. Then claiming that innocent people aren't being convicted is like claiming that no one can commit murder because everybody dies anyway. It implies that if the system was acting non-hypocritically then it would self-immolate because all the police and prosecutors would start by filing all the relevant charges against themselves.

Or, we consider the possibility that someone might actually be falsely accused, e.g. it's not a matter of whether selling drugs is illegal or should be, it's a case where they didn't actually sell any drugs. But then, because they've been accused of selling drugs, they have to plead guilty to something they didn't do or else they'll be charged with some other things that they did do, which they wouldn't have been if not for the false charge, and which many other people have done without being charged. So they'll be convicted and harshly sentenced on that for not pleading guilty to the thing they didn't do.

And maybe these aren't even alternatives since they can both be true at the same time.