The Pittsburgh Post Gazette takes a fair look at plea bargaining, and entertains the possibility that the system has evolved to the point where prosecutors intentionally over-charge, and defendants are effectively punished for exercising their constitutional right to a trial.

Nationally, for fiscal year 2004, 95.5 percent of the 51,666 convictions were reached through guilty pleas. That means that only 2,316 U.S. District Court cases across the country went to trial.

In the Western District of Pennsylvania, the percentage was just a bit lower. Of the 261 convictions that year, 94.3 percent were reached through pleas.

Mr. Kramer, who now teaches at Penn State University, believes the American court system has been acclimated to processing guilty pleas.

“We’ve created a barrier to any potential increase in jury trials,” he said. “If all of a sudden we had a 20 percent increase, it would be tremendously burdensome on the court system to accommodate those.”

[...]

“It’s a perfectly laughable system,” he said. “The prosecutors love it. The message is any sane defendant, guilty or innocent, ought to do the prosecutor’s bidding.”

Not surprisingly, the money quote comes from our old friend, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan:

“Of course it leads to disparity and different sentences,” said Mary Beth Buchanan, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania. “But it’s supposed to. It’s designed to give a reduction to those who readily take responsibility and admit their conduct.”

Or those who’ve done nothing wrong, but are scared to death of the excessively long sentences that could await them at trial thank to prosecutors who pile on charges to extract a plea.

Cato’s Tim Lynch looks at how the plea bargain has devolved into a prosecutorial weapon here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 at 1:09 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.