Quote:
Originally Posted by L-Pink
The reason there is no trial is the guilty party will negotiate a plea-bargain to avoid a trial where their guilt will lead to a longer sentence.
Why people waste their time arguing with you I'll never know.
I'm done.
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Yes, I know that they plea guilty, that reads right there. But pleading guilty and actually being guilty are totally different things. US justice system has been built so that very often it is beneficial to plea guilty even if you wouldn't have done the crime. Statistics support this as people plea guilty to even very hard crimes they haven't done, not to speak of lesser crimes.
"The criminal justice system in the United States today bears little relationship to what the Founding Fathers contemplated, what the movies and television portray, or what the average American believes."
"In actuality, our criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors and with no judicial oversight. The outcome is very largely determined by the prosecutor alone."
In 2013, while 8 percent of all federal criminal charges were dismissed (either because of a mistake in fact or law or because the defendant had decided to cooperate), more than 97 percent of the remainder were resolved through plea bargains, and fewer than 3 percent went to trial. The plea bargains largely determined the sentences imposed.
" For example, the National Registry of Exonerations (a joint project of Michigan Law School and Northwestern Law School) records that of 1,428 legally acknowledged exonerations that have occurred since 1989 involving the full range of felony charges, 151 (or, again, about 10 percent) involved false guilty pleas."
Why Innocent People Plead Guilty by Jed S. Rakoff | The New York Review of Books
If we use that 10% against the number of prisoners in US, it makes 230 000 innocent people for the crimes they were committed for.