Why plea bargains are bad

This bargaining situation parallels labor strikes. Strikes are costly: workers miss paychecks, factories lie idle, and businesses might permanently lose customers. Both labor and management are worse off than if they agreed to the same contract with no strike.

Strikes represent bargaining failures. The economic model of bargaining predicts that plea deals should reflect the strength of the evidence. The prosecution will not give much with an open-and-shut case, but the defense attorney should recognize this and counsel shaving a few years off the sentence. If important evidence gets suppressed or a witness recants their testimony, the shaky case makes prosecutors agree to a reduced charge.

Actual guilt or innocence is secondary in the bargaining model to the likelihood of conviction at trial. While we might hope that innocent defendants always get acquitted, wrongful convictions happen, especially with overworked and underfunded public defenders.

An innocent person should consider a deal if they look guilty enough. We must move past the fantasy that only a guilty person would ever plead guilty. Building criminal justice almost exclusively around plea bargaining has negative consequences. These highlight the limits of the economic focus on trial costs. Plea bargains enable incarceration on the American scale, with over 2.

Whether you think our current incarceration rate is repressive or responsible for the significant drop in crime over the past three decades, mass incarceration could not happen without low cost plea bargains.

The constitutional right to a speedy trial would be violated without guilty pleas. Conversely, speedy adjudication would require many more judges, trial lawyers, and court rooms. Another negative of plea bargaining is adding charges to encourage a deal.

This is largely necessary. Suppose that the fair sentence for a crime is ten years. If this is the max sentence at trial, a defendant will only accept a plea for a shorter sentence. She was essentially left destitute.

Prosecutors now hold the cards when it comes to leveraging punishment, according to a recent New York Times investigation. Update [March 22, ]: In two landmark rulings, the U.

Kennedy is quoted as writing for the majority. Bonus: Read the stories of three others from our film who were forced to confront plea bargains: Patsy Kelly Jarrett , Charles Gampero Jr. Journalistic Standards. By submitting comments here, you are consenting to these rules:. Readers' comments that include profanity, obscenity, personal attacks, harassment, or are defamatory, sexist, racist, violate a third party's right to privacy, or are otherwise inappropriate, will be removed.

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I'm already subscribed. Little did he know that the government had a video proving his innocence, but they buried it long enough for prosecutors to extract the plea first. George spent almost four years behind bars fighting for his innocence before finally being exonerated. In , Lavette Mayes got in a fight with her mother-in-law. Unable to pay, she spent fourteen months in jail awaiting trial, unable to see or touch her children once.

She lost her job. She developed health problems. So instead of spending years fighting her case in failing health, she pled guilty to end the ordeal. Just last year, the state of Georgia executed Ray Cromartie for a murder. The case against him was paper thin and Cromartie maintained his innocence until the end, but Georgia denied every request for DNA testing that could have set the record straight. A lesser-known fact about the case is that 20 years ago, Georgia prosecutors offered Cromartie a plea deal under which he could have been paroled after seven years and free by now.

But Cromartie refused to admit guilt, and so the state retaliated by seeking the death penalty and ultimately killing him. Succumb to coercive tactics like evidence suppression and pretrial detention like George and Lavette, and begrudgingly accept a conviction with lifetime consequences.

Or assert your constitutional rights, like Ray, and face certain retribution. This impossible choice we call plea bargaining takes place tens of thousands of times every day in America. Criminal case dockets have become so bloated in the last fifty years as Americans have disastrously over-relied on the criminal legal system to solve all our problems.

Pressure-packed, conveyor-belt plea bargaining has become the only release valve.