The particular "genius" of plea bargaining is that it seems to allow defendants a chance to reduce harsh sentences while locking them into a system that is stacked against them, says attorney Dan Canon in a conversation with The Crime Report about his new book.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13753145

this book

Our whole criminal justice system is built on expedience: cram as many convictions through as possible as quickly as possible. So, when somebody who really doesn’t have the resources to fight in court, challenges their charges, then the prosecutors typically respond by slapping them with higher charges

The law exists to protect capital. In the 1830s, around the same time that you see the first plea bargains happen in Boston, the legal system was openly and obviously operating along with other institutions to break the back of organized labor.

And since plea bargaining essentially puts a gun to the defendants head, it looks like they’ve agreed to these sort of outrageous outcomes. That’s the genius of plea bargaining at work because it looks like they agreed to whatever draconian conditions have been appended on to their sentence, even if those conditions are patently unconstitutional…

  • Flying Squid
    9•7 months ago

    In the 1990s, I was accused of doing a fender bender hit and run on a lady’s car that did not happen. I even had photos of my car to show that there wasn’t even a scrape on it. I was still told by a lawyer that it wasn’t worth the risk in court, so I should just take the plea bargain.

    I ended up having to do 12 hours of “community service,” which involved picking up garbage on an interstate median while cars went whizzing by and I had to hope one didn’t do a real hit and run.

    The fun part is that every single person doing community service with me said stuff like, “you shouldn’t have to be here, man. I’m doing this for selling X.”