Courts are generally heavily booked, trials take forever, it’s a perennial news issue that courts are underfunded (this seems to be a major factor behind the incredibly nasty and abusive rise in ‘offender-funded’ court systems & treating traffic violations & civil asset seizures as normal funding sources to be maximized) and I’ve seen estimates that as much as 90%+ of all cases resolve as plea bargains. There’s no way the court system could handle a sudden 10-20x increase in workload, which is what would happen if prosecutors stopped settling for somewhat reasonable plea bargains and tried to throw the book at suspects who would then have little choice but to take it to trial.
(I recall reading about an attempt to organize defendants in one US court district to agree to not plea bargain, overloading the system so badly that most of the cases would have to be dropped; but I don’t recall what happened and can’t seem to refind it. I’m guessing it didn’t work out, given that this is almost literally the prisoner’s dilemma.)
Oh, sorry, I think I was unclear or probably even confusing. I didn’t mean prosecutors actually just ship off all suspects to the courts with a long list of charges. I meant that they threaten everyone.
Obviously, a plea bargain makes things much easier for prosecutors so their usual goal is to obtain one. However if the accused is sufficiently stubborn, their choice is (a) to assemble a case and prosecute for a few charges; or (b) to assemble a case and prosecute for many charges. I don’t think there is a major cost-to-prosecutors difference between (a) and (b) so they go for (b).
Courts are generally heavily booked, trials take forever, it’s a perennial news issue that courts are underfunded (this seems to be a major factor behind the incredibly nasty and abusive rise in ‘offender-funded’ court systems & treating traffic violations & civil asset seizures as normal funding sources to be maximized) and I’ve seen estimates that as much as 90%+ of all cases resolve as plea bargains. There’s no way the court system could handle a sudden 10-20x increase in workload, which is what would happen if prosecutors stopped settling for somewhat reasonable plea bargains and tried to throw the book at suspects who would then have little choice but to take it to trial.
(I recall reading about an attempt to organize defendants in one US court district to agree to not plea bargain, overloading the system so badly that most of the cases would have to be dropped; but I don’t recall what happened and can’t seem to refind it. I’m guessing it didn’t work out, given that this is almost literally the prisoner’s dilemma.)
Oh, sorry, I think I was unclear or probably even confusing. I didn’t mean prosecutors actually just ship off all suspects to the courts with a long list of charges. I meant that they threaten everyone.
Obviously, a plea bargain makes things much easier for prosecutors so their usual goal is to obtain one. However if the accused is sufficiently stubborn, their choice is (a) to assemble a case and prosecute for a few charges; or (b) to assemble a case and prosecute for many charges. I don’t think there is a major cost-to-prosecutors difference between (a) and (b) so they go for (b).
In that case, the argument you made here makes no sense.
Why is that?