Absolutely. Litigation is ruinously expensive and prosecutors have an almost flawless conviction rate. When you're placed in such a shitty situation where you get the choice of ruining your life a little and ruining your life a lot(and possibly your family and friends' lives as they try to help you along), it's not as cut and dry as "would you plead guilty knowing you were innocent". People do this every day. It's why prosecutors pile charges on, and it works.
> prosecutors have an almost flawless conviction rate.
This is because anytime there is an absolute chance they'll lose, they drop the case.
And if the case is less than a 100% guaranteed slam dunk, they'll ask for a plea so it'll never go to trial.
Prosecutors cherry pick their trials. It's not possible for every prosecutor everywhere to keep a 98%+ average trial conviction rate in a normal system.
Let me rewind a little bit in my own life. I probably could have fought my charges a little more, but the risk outweighed the reward. You go to trial and anything can happen. Was I 100% innocent, no. Was I 100% guilty, no. But because at the time I was arrested my co-defendant had disappeared (I believe he is still wanted but I have never followed up and the past is the past to me) the focus of the prosecutor at that moment in time was squarely on me. The prosecutors offered me a plea that was almost too good to turn down. Looking back, and after talking to a bunch of people, I probably should not have taken the plea, but you can't go through life second guessing your decisions.
Knowing what I know now, IMO, the better your plea deal the less confident the prosecutor feels about the case. I was looking at a minimum 10 year sentence. I took a plea for one year supervised probation. I took the plea for several reasons. First, going to trial would have cost me at bare minimum $50,000-60,000 in attorney costs (contrary to popular belief your ability to obtain a public defender is based on your income, and assets you have access to, and I did not qualify). As it was I had already spent close to $12,000 on attorneys. The second reason I chose the plea over trial was that going to trial would have been a long, drawn out process where the result may or may not have gone in my favor. You are putting your life in the hands of a judge or jury. In the end my decision to take the plea boiled down to cost and knowing that within 1 year I would be done with everything and could move on with my life. If I had gone to trial, it would have cost a lot more and at the time I was finishing probation I would probably just be going to court. I took it as an easy way to lick my wounds, learn from my experience, and put my life back on track quickly.
Funny side story of it all. When I first started discussing costs with my attorney I asked him what his thought was on total costs. He replied that there were two questions he had for me in determining cost. First, did I want him to play golf with both the judge and the prosecutor, or just the prosecutor. And, the second question was how many games of golf I wanted him to play with them. I laughed and told him as many as it takes. Looking back part of me thinks he may not have been joking. Our legal system is full of I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine scenarios.
> First, did I want him to play golf with both the judge and the prosecutor, or just the prosecutor. And, the second question was how many games of golf I wanted him to play with them.
Reminds me of the time I was learning to drive a stick shift in west texas. My dad was in the passenger seat, and was giving me tons of grief for rolling through a stop sign while paying too much attention to the clutch.
We stopped at a gas station, and a local cop pulled into the pump next to ours. My dad, to tease me, asked the cop how much a ticket for rolling through a stop sign would be.
The cop said "About $100. But let me give you some advice. If you offer the officer the $100 right then and there, you'll save a lot of time and paperwork, and your insurance won't have to find out about it, which can save you more in the long run. It really pays to keep some extra cash in your car."
My dad went poker-faced and said "Thank you for the advice", and then he drove us back home and said "Forget everything that man said.
Sounds like sensible and desirable behaviour to me. You might even call it "normal".
Edit: I'd really like to see how all the downvoters would like to defend their stance. It's obvious that prosecutorial misconduct is not happening when prosecutors abandon cases that are marginal, but when they are harassing people they don't have a chance of getting convicted.
Well I didn't downvote you, but: "Desirable behaviour" would be for a prosecutor to seek truth, not conviction. That's what I would call "normal". And guess what: there are countries in this world where prosecutors think like that: they are glad to drop charges as soon as they see someone's innocent.
You don't have to assume; paying attention would suffice.
Racial disparities, emphasis on victimless crime, asset forfeiture, prison overcrowding, and oh, the fact that USA has a much higher incarceration rate than any comparable polity ever in the history of the human race.
A justice system is broken when people break the rules and subvert the intent of the system. But most of what you're pointing to is, instead, conscious policy choices.
E.g. a society is generally entitled to criminalize activities it does not want people to engage in. That some other people may perceive the crimes as "victimless" is neither here nor there. I'd imagine that very few people convicted of drug crimes are not in fact guilty of those crimes, because the evidence in those cases is usually overwhelming (e.g. caught with physical product in hand).
Similarly, the U.S. has had about 5-10x the murder rate of, say, the U.K., going back probably a century or more, long before the recent rise in incarceration rate. So the fact that the U.S. has a high incarceration rate does not by itself mean that innocent people are being put in prison.
Very little about American policy is "conscious" at the level of us simple citizens. Ignoring that, this is a neat morsel of sophistry! The hundreds of thousands of people who are imprisoned in USA, who would be free in any other nation anywhere ever, aren't "innocent". And why not? Because we define them to be guilty. Ingenious!
Except criminal justice policy is uniquely conscious at the level of citizens. Judges and prosecutors are elected local officials in most states. Three strikes laws were passed by public referendum in places like California. Polls show 80%+ support in favor of keeping hard drugs illegal.
And anyone is ever guilty only because we define it to be so. In the state of nature, robbing a store and killing the clerk is simply the stronger animal exercising its free will over the weaker. And if robbery is illegal because we say so, I fail to see how the robber is less guilty of the crime because one country punishes him with 3 years in prison while we punish him with 10.
It's not just us who consider robbery and murder to be crimes. Every criminal code in history has done the same (although there are often exceptions carved out, especially for murder in the service of the sovereign), and some have even instituted more severe penalties for these actual crimes than we have.
I don't see "don't smoke or sell pot" anywhere in the Ten Commandments.
The judge/jury/overall process seek the truth. I do not consider that the role of the prosecutor at all. I don't think legal philosophy aligns that way either?
I think it's a bit different in the United States, but in my country (D), for example, prosecutors have detailed guidelines how to proceed.
For one, they are obligated to investigate any exonerating evidence and circumstances, and any exculpatory circumstances. All of this must be revealed fully to the court and the defense, prior to the main trial.
For another, they must only charge when they believe that a conviction is more probable than an acquittal ("my chances are at best 20%, but let's see how it goes" would be clear misconduct).
In practice, the conviction rates are more than 90%, for sure (if you count a conviction for a lesser crime).
As a prosecutor once told me: trials can be freak events. After listening to the witnesses firsthand, or after some dramatic revelation, everything can look much different than it looked in the file. But other than that, they almost always win at least partially.
And another reason is workload. Apart from really high profile, highly publicized cases, resources are extremely limited and prosecutors mostly try to close the files.
This is one of the core debates in legal philosophy: Do you want a adversarial or inquisitorial system? Different countries come down on different sides and most legal systems exists somewhere on the continuum. The US adversarial system is far from universals.
I'm not clear why this comment was downvoted either, except perhaps that you mentioned being downvoted, which is a downvote magnet.
But I think you're right: I think it's desirable that prosecutors let go of most cases in which they're not confident of a win. That's called "prosecutorial discretion". If caseloads are high, we want them working on the clearest-cut violations --- maybe with some public policy stretch cases sprinkled in.
Prosecutors should be focused on justice. They should not evaluate themselves, or be evaluated on, the narrow metric of conviction rates. Sometimes doing their job properly should mean being allowed to change their minds, to admit that maybe they're prosecuting the wrong person, or to conceive that the interests of justice are best served by a lighter or suspended sentence. And this is how it works in most of Europe; magistrates are entirely independent, and not beholden to political pressures or to the court of public opinion.
Every case a prosecutor takes and fails to convict is an instance in which the state inflicted harm on a citizen that was later proven to have been unjustified.
Sometimes that's a risk worth taking, but not often. Acquittals are a bad thing.
If you're innocent, by the time you get to pleading, the system has already proven to you that it doesn't work. Even assuming no misbehavior (e.g. planted evidence), the police found you guilty enough to investigate, a judge found you guilty enough to arrest, and a prosecutor found you guilty enough to charge. Why would you gamble and dare think the trial in such a system would work any better?
There was an article on HN recently about a young man who spent nearly a year in jail, waiting for trial. Basically the prosecutor came to him,said "look, you can plead guilty, they will give you a 1 year sentence, take into account that you've been here for a year, you will be released and home within a week. Or, you can go to trial, which can go for months, and then you might end up with a 3-5 year long sentence".
What would you do in this situation? Even if he was completely innocent, the temptation to go home right now, to end the nightmare, must be absolutely huge. I can only guess that there are thousands of people like this in US.
Yes, that's the whole issue. Many times people are offered deals that look better than the ridiculous sentences they will get if they happen to lose. If you don't have a strong alibi, it's tempting to take the deal.
I have been. The prosecutor knew I was innocent too, but didn't care. It was a choice between paying court costs and having a suspended sentence hanging above my head, or potentially getting 3 years in prison. As a black 19 year-old in a white court in Arkansas, the smart choice was obvious.
