In the United States Supreme Court Case Missouri v. Frye, Justice Kennedy made a clear and telling statement about the American Criminal Justice System. He boldly asserted that the plea bargain,
“is not some adjunct to the criminal justice system; it is the criminal justice system” (emphasis added).”
And he’s not wrong; over 95% of cases are resolved through plea bargains.
Prosecutors are largely responsible for this, through what Jenny Roberts, co-director of the Criminal Justice Clinic at American University Washington College of Law, synopsizes as a Prosecutor’s ability to overcharge, as well as leverage “draconian sentencing laws”. It makes the risk of going to trial a real chance at a defendant losing everything.
The misdemeanor system contributes largely to this, trapping defendants and over criminalizing individuals. In fact, if everyone went to trial, the system as we know it, would collapse.
So with Prosecutors and Judges getting their convictions and filling their dockets, one would assume that it is in their best interest to be fair, but instead it becomes an opportunity to control a political narrative. One where not only the prosecutors are free to obscure facts, but where defendants are forced to lie to escape and regain their lives.
A paper written by Thea Johnson in the Georgia State Law Review perhaps, summarizes it best:
…lawyers have created strategies to resolve cases fairly in an unfair system, and these strategies exist because the modern plea process is simultaneously very flexible and not transparent.
Trials are where truth is expected to come out, as someone can find themselves facing perjury charges for lying at trial. But plea bargains do not have mechanisms from preventing outright lies about the facts of a case from bubbling to the surface.
Plea bargains began appearing in courts in the 1920’s, and only became accepted by the court in the 1970’s, Brady v. United States, 397 U.S. 742, 758 (1970). Once again quoting Thea Johnson:
Plea bargaining became popular in the early twentieth century for two reasons: first, because it allowed judges and lawyers to hide their own corrupt practices—namely, using bribes to grant defendants a beneficial plea deal—and second, because the normalized use of pleas allowed courts an efficient means of dealing with the burdens of a rapidly expanding criminal system, Albert W. Alschuler, Plea Bargaining and Its History, 79 COLUM. L. REV. 1, 26–29 (1979); see also Lucian E. Dervan, Class v. United States: Bargained Justice and a System of Efficiencies, 2018 CATO SUP. CT. REV. 113, 121, Supra note 19.
The history of plea bargaining demonstrates that pleas were always open to manipulation and corruption. As a result, early courts were suspicious of plea bargaining.
The quote I keep hearing is that our system is not perfect, but it is the best one we have.
Yet it seems if we were to implement the same standards for trial as we know it in plea bargaining as we know it, it too, would not survive.
🖤 Love what we do? Support Clutch.
