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?
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?