Chances of being found not guilty

Chances of being found not guilty(en.wikipedia.org)

9 points by eli_awry 13 years ago | 7 comments

byoung2 13 years ago |

The system is set up to push people toward plea bargains. Even an innocent person charged with first degree murder and facing 25 to life would consider a plea of involuntary manslaughter with a sentence as short as 3 years. Over 90% of trials in the US end in a plea bargain...I wonder how many people take a plea when they are innocent.

coopdog 13 years ago | |

As unethical as it would be, a scientific experiment to replicate the system closely and charge people with falsified crimes to find out the percentages who admit guilt while knowing they're innocent.. it potentially really could save thousands of innocent people

eli_awry 13 years ago | | |

Another interesting thing would be to let the plea-bargain cases go to trial, with a moot outcome and see how many come up not guilty. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to motivate lawyers to argue their hardest.

byoung2 13 years ago | | |

I bet someone somewhere has pitched that very idea as a reality show.

zoowar 13 years ago |

Another way to look at it is that district attorneys are doing their job and only prosecuting cases with solid evidence to back them up.

malandrew 13 years ago | |

... and also making sure a certain percentage of innocent people end up in jail because they use the maximum sentence threat to squeeze out plea bargains from innocent people.

Their job is justice and the truth first, not prosecution at any cost and willfully ignorant of the facts or willfully uninterested in the facts. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way they started doing the latter erroneously equating with it being the correct path towards the former.

zoowar 13 years ago | | |

Agreed, plea bargains should be based on charges, not sentences.