Literally 98% of cases plea out^1, bypassing the entire system of court procedure that is supposed to resolve these issues.
1:https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...
> In fiscal year 2022, only 290 of 71,954 defendants in federal criminal cases – about 0.4% – went to trial and were acquitted, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest available statistics from the federal judiciary. Another 1,379 went to trial and were found guilty (1.9%).
So 1669 defendants went to trial, and 1379 were found guilty, roughly 80%.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/14/fewer-tha...
And in most other places where it’s even an option it’s subject to much more rigorous scrutiny and pushback than here.
It will never go away here without a lot of effort, because prosecutors love it because they get to hype their “conviction rates” for re election. There are huge swathes of evidence of people pleading out while factually innocent because they can’t afford the cost (public defenders aren’t incentivized here - you need your own counsel), stress, inconvenience, and beyond.
Plea bargains, as implemented in the US, are a huge system drive by perverse incentives.
1. the federal law enforcement, and prosecutors are prefect humans that only ever go after the guilty
2. The system is sooo skewed in favor of the government that fighting them is pointless, likely due to immense corruption in the system it self
Since no humans are perfect, I think the stronger case is for #2 to be reality
Imagine you offer a great soccer player a million dollars if he can shoot 50 goals in a row, and he gets to choose the defenders and goalies. He's probably going to choose children to go against him.
99.9% of criminal cases that go to trial in Japan end in a guilty verdict.
So maybe some humans are perfect enough?
If the feds have a high bar before opening a case, it's not immediately unreasonable that most of the cases are managed with plea bargains.
It might be better to look at the process beginning with arrests or beginning with investigations.
I can't find what percentage of that total pleaded guilty, but I did find[2]: "Of the 39 successful appellants in the Post Office Scandal, 35 had pleaded guilty to at least one charge against them."
Personally, I'm not feeling 100% confident in the adversarial system right now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal [2] https://evidencebasedjustice.exeter.ac.uk/false-guilty-pleas...
i.e a prosecutor should not be allowed to plead out a felony to a misdemeanor, that should be by default viewed as unethically coercive
