Rigged Injustice: The Truth About Plea Deals

Philadelphia, PA - The long-held belief that the US criminal justice system would rather let ten guilty people go free than wrongfully convict even one innocent person of a crime they didn’t commit is one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves in America.

The Constitution is supposed to guarantee that defendants in criminal cases are given a fair, speedy trial by a jury of their peers. For 90 to 95 percent of defendants this right has been stolen from them.

Along with the theft of this right by the prosecution, many others are dispensed with as well. The truth is, the authority to decide who is guilty of what, how much time they will serve and what other punishments are handed down are given over almost exclusively to prosecutors, and is decided behind closed doors.

On its face anyone can see how this system of plea deals is inherently unbalanced and blatantly unfair, but how defendants are forced into taking these deals, the lack of any sort of oversight in them and their devastating consequences, make them a crime against humanity.

The excessively high guilty rate that the system of plea deals has created is counter to any sense of the idea of justice as Judge John Gleeson, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York recently explained in an opinion. In that same opinion, he tells us that “few misconceptions about government are more mischievous than the idea a policy is sound simply because a court finds it permissible.”

I do not argue that plea deals save the courts a lot of docket space, and prosecutors a lot of money, they do both. However, so would reducing the number of ineffective and often racist and classist laws; as well as, changing the way in which we deal with a lot of poverty related crimes.

The point is that the same purpose can be served by actually resolving the issues that lead to potential criminal activity in a just manner.

Of the total number of people incarcerated in county jails in America, 62 percent of them are so-called pretrial detainees, this places these defendants at a huge disadvantage both at trial and in any plea bargaining that may happen in their case.

It places them in a position regardless of guilt or innocence, of excessively high emotional distress that would otherwise not be present in the process and clouds their judgement. This alone creates a system of coercion, making the question in the so-called guilty plea colloquy, have you been coerced in anyway a rhetorical question, with the answer being, yes.

Then there is the disparity in sentencing that defendants are threatened with. The average sentence for a person with a federal Narcotics charge who accepts a plea deal is five years and four months, by contrast, those who risk going to trial are sentenced on average to at least sixteen years in prison. Again, this is both a threat and coercion.

Prosecutors often charge defendants not only with the highest charge they can possibly charge them with, they often overcharge them and with multiple charges for the exact same crime. In addition, prosecutors will often lie to defendants, their attorneys and defendants families about the evidence the prosecution has in a case to support these charges.

Many of the crimes that prosecutors charge defendants with are broad and overreaching at a minimum, making the statement by a former Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau that he could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich scarily true.

Prosecutors take advantage of the mental instabilities incarceration causes compounding these, with fear and intimidation tactics designed to coerce defendants, their attorneys and defendants families into taking deals for crimes there is a likelihood they wouldn’t have been convicted of in the first place.

All of this takes place behind the closed doors of the prosecutor's office. When these deals finally land before a judge merely for them to sign off on, to give them the appearance of legitimacy, judges are denied any discretion other than to accept the deal or not, they are not afforded nor is the defendant to have any of the evidence heard or its validity weighed.

Defendants are told to sign a guilty plea colloquy, which absolves the prosecution and the judge of any “wrongdoing,” then asked these same questions in court. Their answers being falsified by the defendant's due to their lack of understanding as to the hoax that just took place and how they were, in fact, lied to, intimidated, coerced, and had their rights denied to them to make it all possible.

Too many innocent defendants are forced to plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit every year and this number grows, as the police and prosecutors are given more and more power and discretion by legislatures who feed off a fearful population driven mad by the mainstream media.

In fact, if you take into account the number of people in prison resting around 2.2 million people, and that about 2 million of them received their conviction because they were coerced into taking a plea deal; then that too many people, can be estimated between 40 and 160 thousand people that are behind bars often with very long sentences who are innocent of any crime.

Further exacerbating this problem is that once you have take a plea deal your ability to appeal your case is severely limited. Making it so only the most blatantly innocent people get a chance to have their cases actually heard, leaving tens of thousands of innocent people’s liberties stripped from them unjustly, their lives and those of their families and communities in ruins and the cycle of poverty perpetuated.