Why Innocent People Plead Guilty

[The_Queen]

With all due respect, I am going to back out of this debate. I originally posted to correct you on whether the United States requires jury trials. I then posted to give you the Court's reasoning as to why it came to this conclusion on federal rules of criminal procedure (which affect very few criminal cases overall). I did not, nor do I, intend to get into a social policy debate on the rules of criminal procedure.

Nonetheless, I will point out, as someone with a bit more specialization in the American Criminal system, that your conclusion requires a lot of assumptions (which may or may not be correct) and over simplifies the prosecution's mindset. In essence, and speaking as someone with a disgust for prosecutors, there are many reasons that a prosecutor may not want a jury as a matter of principle: (1) jury nullification, (2) hung jury means retrial, with the defendant knowing your witnesses and arguments, (3) jurors might not fully understand the law as well as a lone judge, (4) a judge is better at evaluating the facts and excluding prejudicial evidence than a jury, should it come out, and (5) there are about 15 judges per federal district court, which means more predictability to learn and appeal to idiosyncrasies than 12 randomly selected jurors (and federal jurors come from a larger geographic area than state jurors). Again, not intending to debate, just pointing out that your internal reasoning might look attractive on paper, but ignores legal realities.

[Tolpuddle Martyr]

Juries are far from perfect, yeah they have a public relations purpose in that it sure looks like direct democracy but in my country at least the right of lawyers to strike out jurors ends up with juries that are usually middle aged WASPish blokes, which is handy for lawyers who know how to play to the prejudices of jurors because the evidence suggests it's their personal prejudices and beliefs tend to decide how they'll cast their vote more than the actual evidence presented in a given case. Then there's the whole issue of keeping them off social media which is dashed difficult when the device for causing mistrials is the same thing you call your mother with.

Juries are great in theory but I can think of some pretty compelling reasons to put your faith in a judge who at least knows what he's doing over twelve angry men who don't.

[Askold]

I think the real problem in the plea bargaining in USA is that they sometimes delay the court proceedings and keep people locked up until they confess to a crime regardless of their guilt.

...Like that one case we already talked about a while ago.

[Sigmaleph]

Which is bull, since a rational defendant would only waive the right to a jury trial if said defendant thought that a bench trial would be preferable, so forcing a jury trial against the defendant's explicit request does in fact harm the defendant by forcing a situation that the defendant feels is worse.

You don't, as a general rule, have the right to waive your rights. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is a debate I don't want to get into, but the reasoning is that it's easy for someone in power to bully you into waiving the rights that are supposed to protect you from those people in the first place* (see also: exactly the thing we are talking about in this thread).

As I understand, being able to waive your right to a jury is an exception, not a general property of rights, and so it's not surprising that such an exception is conditional.

*There are some weird game-theoretic things where barring yourself from a course of action puts you in a better negotiating position than someone who has that course of action but just chooses not to take it, even assuming all actors are rational (for some meaning of the word).