A schoolboy wrongly accused of two murders | Hacker News Reader

A schoolboy wrongly accused of two murders

bbc.com

33 pointsThevet8 comments

Rather damning indictment that plea bargaining is an improvement to the system for innocent people.

Surely, it only works if pleading innocence is riskier, otherwise everyone would do it?

I thought the point was that, for minor crimes, it makes sense to plead guilty because the resulting prison sentence is shorter than waiting months in jail for the full trial. It's not a risk calculation.

It's totally a risk calculation - the risk of being found guilty in a trial and doing the longer sentence vs definitely being convicted now and getting a shorter sentence. If you know you're innocent and are being offered a year in jail now for pleading guilty vs 20 years in jail at a trial and the police are telling you they have seven people planning to swear they saw you did it - which do you pick?

And remember, the police can lie to you.

Well the theory behind plea bargaining is that it's really only for guilty people; which is a tricky concept in itself pre-trial. The idea is that with open-and-shut cases where the prosecution has so much evidence it's pretty clear the guy is guilty, they can plea bargain the sentence down to avoid wasting the courts time and prevent overburdening the system.

However, it is commonly abused by prosecutors pressuring less obvious cases into pleading guilty. People who may well be innocent but can't afford decent representation, are so afraid of the potential 20yr sentence that they plead out for 6 months in minimum security.

So yes, every guilty person should plea bargain (unless they have great lawyers), but unfortunately the plea bargaining system means a significant number of potentially innocent people are pressured into pleading out.

Not a particularly just system.

That's why I was saying that it's not a good sign for a justice system if plea bargains are better for innocent people. They're only meant to be better for guilty people, in order to speed up processing in overburdened courts.

Plea bargains are outright worse for the system. Instead, there should be no plea bargains and if the system is over burdened it should be forced to dismiss any court cases above the maximum it can handle, starting with the lowest level offenses and working its way up, blind to who the defendant is. This will combat the over legalization of society while ensuring true crimes are still punished.

Yep A sad example of this is the Making a Murderer show. Look at how screwed up the US judicial system is. Pretty sad when you read the offical case and then watch the show

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