There is a common impulse to irrationally favor the apparently weaker party in any (even consensual and transparent) transaction. For example, many people dislike when a low-skill worker agrees to work for low wages, or a tenant agrees to rent with the possibility of high rent increases, or when a gambler agrees to partake in a casino that includes predictable losses and a policy of banning winning players. This is just another example of that. In reality it makes perfect sense to take pleas, or settlements, etc.
This isn’t very useful without more description of what you think they’re getting wrong.
I guess it’s non-obvious that the prevailing opinion in these parts is anti- and therefore there may be some motivated reasoning. But that point alone only shifts my opinion slightly. How is it not terrible to threaten people into pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit?
It seems like the prevalence of this systems is also a big reason the “standard” penalties for crimes are so large; people usually don’t get the full sentence.
This means the harshness of punishment is often really the decision of a prosecutor. That’s not how the system is stated to work and it seems on the face of it really bad that it ddoes actually work that way.
Why even have a legislative branch that’s democratically elected if there are so many laws on the books that the actual penalities are just amatter of how many of those somebody decides to enforce/punish?
How is it not terrible to threaten people into pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit?
It’s entirely opt-in. If you don’t want to take a plea / think you will win at trial, the courts are still open to you. Having the option to plea is strictly good for defendants, on an individual level.
Sometimes people claim that, as a second order effect, legislators account for the possibility of pleas and make the penalties in their laws stronger, and this second order effect is so strong it “overcomes” the first order effect. Like most rationalists, I have a prior that first order effects dominate. I’d need some kind of extraordinary evidence and an accounting for why legislators are so aggressive to understand otherwise.
Other times people say, well, it’s actually good that everything has to go to trial, because this reduces prosecutors’ throughput, and therefore their ability to “threaten” people in general. But this is a generic argument for making trials slower and more expensive. The whole point of a legal system is to threaten people. Why not just argue that every time a prosecutor wants to charge someone he has to do a half marathon first?
The plea bargaining system seems very reasonable and I think a lot of people are groupthought against it.
There is a common impulse to irrationally favor the apparently weaker party in any (even consensual and transparent) transaction. For example, many people dislike when a low-skill worker agrees to work for low wages, or a tenant agrees to rent with the possibility of high rent increases, or when a gambler agrees to partake in a casino that includes predictable losses and a policy of banning winning players. This is just another example of that. In reality it makes perfect sense to take pleas, or settlements, etc.
This isn’t very useful without more description of what you think they’re getting wrong.
I guess it’s non-obvious that the prevailing opinion in these parts is anti- and therefore there may be some motivated reasoning. But that point alone only shifts my opinion slightly. How is it not terrible to threaten people into pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit?
It seems like the prevalence of this systems is also a big reason the “standard” penalties for crimes are so large; people usually don’t get the full sentence.
This means the harshness of punishment is often really the decision of a prosecutor. That’s not how the system is stated to work and it seems on the face of it really bad that it ddoes actually work that way.
Why even have a legislative branch that’s democratically elected if there are so many laws on the books that the actual penalities are just amatter of how many of those somebody decides to enforce/punish?
It’s entirely opt-in. If you don’t want to take a plea / think you will win at trial, the courts are still open to you. Having the option to plea is strictly good for defendants, on an individual level.
Sometimes people claim that, as a second order effect, legislators account for the possibility of pleas and make the penalties in their laws stronger, and this second order effect is so strong it “overcomes” the first order effect. Like most rationalists, I have a prior that first order effects dominate. I’d need some kind of extraordinary evidence and an accounting for why legislators are so aggressive to understand otherwise.
Other times people say, well, it’s actually good that everything has to go to trial, because this reduces prosecutors’ throughput, and therefore their ability to “threaten” people in general. But this is a generic argument for making trials slower and more expensive. The whole point of a legal system is to threaten people. Why not just argue that every time a prosecutor wants to charge someone he has to do a half marathon first?