Whatever happened to rather that 10 guilty men walk free rather than that one man be jailed innocent?
The innocent accused are paying the steepest price today, they end up pleading guilty, lose their livelihood, rights, and lots more.
If the system would grind to a halt it would grind to a halt for everybody, not just for the guilty. And maybe that would allow for a better system rather than one where might makes right and the amount of money you can muster for your defense is the biggest factor in determining the outcome.
No, it does not logically follow that because the innocent accused face an unjust burden today, stupid decisions we make going forward couldn't make their burden even worse. There was a New Yorker story about a young defendant spending years in Rikers waiting for a trial that saw continuance after continuance; that's what happens today, in a system that relies heavily on plea deals to clear caseloads.
I can't make heads or tails of your position. The fact that the justice system is overloaded has no bearing on the plea bargain situation since it is not used to lighten the load on the justice system but rather to concentrate more power on the few remaining cases.
You make it seem as if the plea bargaining system is used as an efficiency gain where those that 'know they're guilty' are going to plead guilty and all those that know they are not are going to have their day in court. If that were the case I would not have a problem with it, alas it is very far from the truth.
Sure you can. My position is very straightforward. The innocent accused already wait too long for their day in court because of an overburdened court system. They would wait vastly longer --- serving, as is the routine in places like China, the majority of their purported sentence in pre-trial detention --- if the courts were forced to pointlessly spend weeks on criminal cases in which neither party believes the accused has any chance of prevailing.
Increase burden on court system: decrease resources allocated to the innocent accused.
No, you've read my comment, made an orthogonal point, and then suggested that I don't understand that point. I do understand it; it's simply orthogonal to mine.
You're also very happy to mis-frame my point, repeatedly suggesting that I believe there's no meaningful injustice in the status quo. That is not what I believe. I've been pretty clear about the fact that there is a significant problem that urgently needs correction. It's just not exactly the problem you care about, and so you caricature my points to try to win the argument.
Once again: regardless of how often the innocent accept bogus plea agreements, those innocent who choose to fight their cases are greatly harmed by a system that eliminates plea bargains.
Those innocent who choose to fight are also greatly harmed by the current system of plea bargaining because as the linked article shows it's all about the conviction rate and not about the guilt or innocence of the accused and when the might of the state is brought to bear those innocent that decided to fight rather than to accept the plea are still convicted in suspiciously large numbers.
So plea bargaining as we see it at present does not appear to help those innocent who fight their cases. Because it's all about winning for the state, not about guilt or innocence.
The current system, which includes plea bargains, is greatly flawed. Prosecutors in the US simply have too much power as well as distorted incentives. If they did not have this power then they would not be able to abuse the plea bargain system as they do. But eliminating plea bargains would not be an improvement. Despite the abuses it does improve efficiency and if it did not exist it would not materially reduce prosecutorial power although it would reduce the number of convictions per year. Bad plea bargains are a symptom, not the cause.
> Whatever happened to rather that 10 guilty men walk free rather than that one man be jailed innocent?
That has always been bullshit, the way you and most of the Internet are misusing this quotation.
Why 10 to 1? Why not 1 to 1 or 1e100000 to 1?
This ratio is purely arbitrary.
Obviously, if you really followed through with the gist of your argument, we should never convict anyone, because better to let everyone go than miss the one injustice in a thousand years.
Unless you can make a case for a specific ratio, 10 to 1 has no special meaning.
The quotation only argues that the balance should be biased towards aquittal. Nothing more.
The innocent accused are paying the steepest price today, they end up pleading guilty, lose their livelihood, rights, and lots more.
If the system would grind to a halt it would grind to a halt for everybody, not just for the guilty. And maybe that would allow for a better system rather than one where might makes right and the amount of money you can muster for your defense is the biggest factor in determining the outcome.