i still don't understand why she in first place admitted guilt for something she didn't do? is this really common procedure to admit something you didn't do in US?
back
6 comments
For minor cases, it costs less to plea guilty outright.
But this often holds true for even major crimes.
Plea guilty: Get 90 day suspended sentence, pay fines of $1000.
Fight case: Chance of 10 years in prison, pay $10,000 to lawyer guaranteed, chance of fines of $10,000.
Add in a prosecutor who is fighting dirty, which would you pick?
The problem is that trumped up charges, being offered significantly reduced plea deals, the cost of fighting the charges, and how awful public defenders are (regardless of fault) all combine into a nightmare where very few are willing to demand their right to trial.
To me the simplest solution is to end plea deals because they are effectively a punishment for insisting on a right. Cutting the sentence by 90% if someones takes a plea is the same as increasing a sentence by 1000% if someone demands on their right to a trial. This should not be allowed.
I totally agree, plea deals are effectively a punishment for invoking your right to a trial. People should absolutely be allowed to plead guilty, but they shouldn't be rewarded for it.
The only argument I've seen for plea deals is that they save time and money. Which I'm sure is true, but is that really sufficient reason to mess with people's right to a trial?
Plea deals do save time and money, but at what expense? They allow for courts to try more cases that they would otherwise ignore as insignificant. They allow those who commit major crimes to get off with much lighter sentences (I've read about child sexual abuse cases pleading down to child endangerment, which raises far less flags on a background check). They also allow people to be bludgeoned into accepting charges they are innocent of. I just don't see how people can justify it at all.
But in any country without plea guilt deal like mine, you have only once choice : the trial with full cost and the possible high sentence. I don't get what you loose with the deal, it's just an additional option.
For any individual case, you don't lose by having the option available. But more options doesn't always lead to better outcomes, see the Prisoners' Dilemma for the classic example.
In this situation, having lots of plea deals predisposes the system to increase sentences for cases which go to trial, in order to get more plea deals. If every single person gets the harsher "trial" punishment, then there will be pressure to make the punishment fit the crime. When only 6% of people get that one, and 94% get a lighter sentence due to a plea deal, the "trial" punishment can be way worse.
For a really obvious and somewhat contrived example of how more options isn't necessarily a good thing, imagine if you could get a discount on your taxes if you agreed never to criticize the government. You don't have to take that choice, and you lose nothing by having it available, but I think most of us would see that program as a really bad thing.
> In this situation, having lots of plea deals predisposes the system to increase sentences for cases which go to trial, in order to get more plea deals.
...
> if you could get a discount on your taxes if you agreed never to criticize the government.
Ah ok. The problem is not the deal itself, but that the system's goal then lead to utilize the deal in negative ways.
I think that's right. A plea deal in any given case may be OK, but when they're a pervasive part of the system they start to look like a punishment for insisting on a trial.
In England, there's no such thing as a plea deal, but a guilty plea is taken into account at sentencing. It's tacitly understood that you'll get a modest reduction in your sentence if you plead guilty, but there's no explicit guarantee. It's enough to induce pleas from the obviously guilty, but it won't sway anyone who stands a chance of winning a trial.
The American system is clearly not serving justice, as we saw in the Swartz case. The gulf between plea deals and sentences at trial can only be explained by an intention to coerce innocent men into pleading guilty.
The whole of society loses in so many ways. Forcing a trial to occur ensures that prosecutions cost money, hopefully substantially more than they are able to collect in fines.
A functional court system transfers money from society as a whole to fund the necessary punishment of individuals. Each action is a financial loss so its not incentivized to pursue them unless society as a whole benefits enough to justify the cost of the system.
A dysfunctional system derives monetary gain from persecuting individuals and thus is incentivized to do so even if society doesn't benefit and in fact even if they aren't guilty. This is exactly what you see in this story.
Further people faced with life destroying circumstances aren't rational actors they can be easy to manipulate into a plea with sufficient threats. Having a trial especially in serious matters ensures justice has at least a chance to be done.
but won't you have then some criminal record affecting your employment options?
never heard about this in Europe that people would be admitting guilt for something they haven't done
False confessions are in fact pretty common. They're most common with juveniles and the mentally ill, for example, or when people are being interrogated for 12-16 hours straight and just need to leave, or when the police lie to suspects.
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/legalclinic/wrongfulconvicti...
https://www.exonerationproject.org/resources/false-confessio...
The motives for such are pretty easy to see in her story. "In 2015, I failed a background check for a new job because, according to the NYPD, I hadn’t paid the ticket 'I' had gotten for walking in a park in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn after hours, at 10pm. Now there was a misdemeanor on my record, and I had 60 days to clear it up if I wanted to keep the job, which meant trekking to lower Manhattan to criminal court. ...I tried to explain the long history of mix-ups, but the judge wouldn’t listen. He told me I’d have to go to trial, which could take months. By that time the job would be long gone. ...The cop told me to go back in and plead guilty, and then I’d pay a fine and the judge would dismiss the charge and let me off with a warning."
She believed the costs to pleading guilty would be lower than fighting the charge.
95% of all inmates in the United States never had a trial. Due process is dead. It makes sense to me why someone would plead guilty and take a short plea deal than risk rotting in prison for years on trumped up charges.
Especially when it's fairly standard (and legal) to explicitly threaten longer sentences and harsher charges for daring to bring a case to trial.
The cost and bother of fighting such minor tickets, especially when the defense is kind of odd like this case, are both way beyond the small fines minor nuisance tickets like this have. Also she tried the first couple times this happened and didn't get anywhere with the judge in court (which isn't too surprising the courts that deal with those tickets have a huge number of cases to deal with every day) and she was able to get the tickets expunged through the system after pleading guilty.
The penalty for most small crimes is less onerous than the burden of fighting them.
Unfortunately, this is often true of larger crimes as well.
It's incredibly common for low-level criminal charges, as much of the time they will allow you to plea to a non-criminal offence rather than charging you with a misdemeanor.
Even if you figure on a 1-in-1000 chance of being wrongly convicted it is probably not worth the risk of having a criminal charge on your record.
I have a number of friends who have done so; the funny thing is even the for ones who had done something wrong, they had not done the thing they plead to.
(most strangely is someone who was ticketed for reckless driving, fought it and took a deal for a noise violation; it was the same fine, but no points on the license; their car was definitely not too loud).