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Originally Posted by Luckbox Inc
I don't have any sources there but it seems correct.
No doubt there have been some cases where someone is innocent but the evidence looks bad and they take a plea. Legal dramas are built on this sort of stuff-- usually with the defense attorneys urging their client to plea and the defendants refusing to admit to a crime they didn't commit. It makes for good TV.
When cases do actually go to trail though, the conviction rate is very high- and I did find some numbers there-- https://www.pewresearch.org/short-re...itted-in-2022/ -- Less than 1% are acquitted at the Federal level. Perhaps in county courts the number of acquittals is a bit higher but I doubt it's by much.
Yeah, I saw that something like 95% of federal cases are settled by plea deal instead of going to trial. They say that if those people went to trial the system would grind to a halt. But I just wonder from a philosophical perspective, if the state has evidence that you are guilty of crime X, which has a minimum sentence of 15 years, meaning the state has detrmined that is the minimum appropriate punishment for anyone guilty of crime X, that the state should be able to just waive that punishment and ignore the fact that you are guilty of crime X at all. Instead,a simply to save time, they basically say "you are guilty of crime X and should serve 15 years, but make our job easier and we will pretend you only did crime Y and send you to jsil for 5 years.
That whole construct seems corrupt to me. Esp considering that whether a person is offered such a deal is dependent on individual prosecutors who may have political or personal reasons to not offer a deal. Should one person be able to get a deal for crime Y and 5 years when another person guilty of the very same offense not ne offered a deal because the prosecutor is up for reelection and wants to appear tough on crime? Or perhaps one district is backlogged in cases while another is not?
So I see how it can be advantageous in some circumstances but it seems like the whole system is based on a corrupt foundation. Maybe if there was some sort of standardization, like anyone facing trial for X will be offered a deal for Y, rather than giving individual prosecutors personal discretion. Im sure if I worked through that, it would create another set of problems as well. It just strikes me as an inherently unjust, albiet convenient process.