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Comment by draugadrotten | Hacker News Reader

Plea bargains. A promise of 1 year in low sec prison vs the risk of getting a life sentence in solitary.

It's similar to what was done to witches in medieval times: "Confess, and we will kill you gently, or be sentenced and be burned alive."

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Plea bargains is such an odd and dangerous concept. It can be misused heavily. "This petty crime has a max sentence of 10 years, if you confess we will give you 2" may trick even innocent people into confessing.

That's what I don't get. If you threaten someone with 10 or 20 or 50 years in prison, then why the hell would you allow that person to only serve 2 years? If you thought about giving him that much, then clearly he must be a very dangerous person to society. I probably wouldn't want such a person to get out after only 2 years. If the prosecutors are charging such a person with 10x less than what he should be getting then maybe those prosecutors should be investigated for corruption. For instance, like how it happens when the prosecutors are always somehow much more lenient against cops.

But of course it has nothing to do with how dangerous he is in most cases. They're just selectively enforcing vague laws just to pile them up and force him to accept at least some prison time, even if he considers himself innocent.

That should be illegal and considered against human rights, especially since usually I believe the judges have no say in it, as the charges happen before the accused is brought in front of a judge. Without a judge you can't have "justice" either. You just have government bullies using the government's might to put someone - anyone - in prison, even if he's innocent or only guilty of minor offences. This is exactly why such abuses of power should be illegal.

There is an interesting asymmetry between the two parties.

To the prosecutor it is just a day job, whether the guy spends 1 or 10 years in prison won't really change anything to his holiday plans. To the defendant, he is playing with his own life. He will have to be locked in a room with thugs for many years, away from his family or any prospect of a normal life.

So both parties have a very different risk aversion in that game. So the prosecution plays with that.

Now if you inflicted a significant pain (career progression, financial penalty) on the prosecutor every time he sent someone to court that turned out to be judged innocent, then you would even this "game" and would probably end up with a more fair bargain.

I also think that systems that have plea bargains, also have a tendency towards longer sentences for petty crimes. Just so discourage people fighting long, expensive trials.

That's what lawyers are for, I hope he had a good one.

Actually, the fairness of the trial should be a given, and the lawyers should be merely additional parties whose role is to assist the defendant's handicap of lacking the needed professional law knowledge. Lawyers are not something that one must employ in a dog fight against abusive prosecutors.

In the US Prosecutors are given impunity to do just about anything to get a conviction. The only recourse for a defendant is to get their conviction overturned but that does not give them the years of their life back while waiting for an appeal.

As to fairness it’s considered completely reasonable for an innocent person who is a possible flight risk to spend a year in jail awaiting trial.

Actually, prosecutors are governed by many rules from constitutional and statutory law as well as canons of ethics that apply to their special position. They have an obligation to promptly disclose any and all evidence they encounter favorable to the defendant. They have an obligation to drop charges at any point that it is apparent that there is no probable cause that the defendant is guilty of a crime, and not to prosecute when it is clear that the state cannot meet its burden of proof (in a criminal matter, beyond a reasonable doubt) by admissible evidence.

That being said, prosecutors are humans, and often-times egotistical, political, cynical, and more than occasionally vindictive humans with all that entails. So, it is hardly uncommon to see rules already stacked in the state's favor bent or broken.

Trials are virtually extinct in the USA. With few exceptions, if you find yourself going to trial, you are not in a good place. While good lawyers should be trial lawyers and unafraid of trying any triable case, the vast majority of the time if you are getting off, you are getting off pretrial with a dismissal or deferred prosecution agreement. If you lose on pretrial motions and the state is intent on prosecuting, then most of the time if your attorney can get you a deal and recommends that you take it, then it's a choice between pride/"truth" and rolling dice loaded against you and paying for it big time.

While in principle as a defendant you are not supposed to be punished for taking your right to go to trial, the plea system punishes you heavily, and if you refuse to "take responsibility" by admitting guilty (the earlier the better) and expressing remorse, then you get punished even more post-conviction, with a heavier sentence, and then certainly being denied parole if that is available in the state system.

In theory all of what you said is true, in practice a prosecutors 'absolute immunity' is a rather hard hurdle to overcome.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/01/30/7t...

PS: Absolute immunity protects from both criminal prosecution and lawsuits, so in general they can at worst be fired possibly disbarred. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_immunity

Absolute immunity is mostly a protection from civil lawsuits in personal capacity. When there is prosecutorial misconduct in a criminal case, defendants can get sanctions ranging to from dismissal with prejudice, mistrial, exclusion of evidence, to post-conviction relief depending on the severity of the misconduct. The biggest barriers are often either that the misconduct is hidden and difficult or impossible for the defendant (or really, his attorney) to discover, or that judges may decide that the misconduct was "harmless" and the defendant was not prejudiced, even in the face of blatant misconduct, when there is otherwise strong evidence.

As for the prosecutor themselves, defendants or judges can and do refer misconduct to bar associations which can and do disbar prosecutors. Judges can directly hold prosecutors in contempt and fine or jail them in extreme cases, or refer them for criminal prosecution on charges ranging from perjury, obstruction of justice, official misconduct, and criminal contempt and so on. As with any criminal cases involving criminal justice professionals, this is quite rare, but it does happen, and absolute immunity is no barrier to it.

I would like to go a little off-topic and explain a common misconception about the medieval times: it was usually "confess and you will get a light punishment, or otherwise we will do something really bad to you, and if you're innocent the lord will save you". This is actually a fairly interesting game theory: people that truely believed they were innocent, believed the lord would save them.

As such, it was usually only the innocent people that went through the trial-by-god process, and very often the priest conducting the trial rigged the process, and very few people were actually killed in the process.

Are plea bargains allowed in the Dutch justice system? I know they're not in at least two neighbouring countries.

No, but confession is often seen as a 'softening' factor in the weighing of the punishment by the judge

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