Do plea bargains violate the right to a fair trail?

(There was a similar thread in 2007 discussing plea bargains, but it went nowhere and didn't address my question specifically)

Here are some of facts for your consideration:

-90% to 95% of all criminal cases in the United States do not reach a jury.

-25% of all people exonerated by DNA evidence took a plea bargain.

-Mandatory minimums take away a judge's discretion to be more lenient, but a prosecutor can still offer a defendant almost any length of sentence.

-The violence and sexual assault in prison (especially against white male prisoners) is very intimidating and would incentivize anyone to reach a plea bargain to avoid a more violent prison and more time at risk. While this is a problem for the entire justice system, not just regarding plea bargains, it is relevant for understanding why innocent people agree to plea guilty.

-As with all guilty pleas, plea bargains cannot be appealed, so even if you are exonerated later on by new evidence it is difficult to actually be released (in fact, I don't even know how they are acquitted). To make things worse, there are no court records (save the record of the guilty plea) and the prosecutor doesn't need to hold on to any evidence.

-The conflict of interest between the prosecutor and the defense attorney. Defense attorneys usually want to stay on friendly terms with prosecutors so that they can get better plea bargains for their clients, hence perpetuating the plea bargain system itself.

video for plea bargain information.

So here is my question, does giving prosecutors such power constitute a violation of the right to a fair trial in an objective legal system (i.e. the ideal legal system)?

And for those who think that the justice system would fall apart with out plea bargains:

-Around 50% of prisoners in the United States are serving for drug offenses (state and federal). While some of these prisoners might have been charged with some other violent crime had they not been charged with a drug offense, most are just non-violent drug users and dealers.

-In almost all civil law countries, plea bargains are impossible for two reasons. One, if the defendant confesses; a confession is entered into evidence, but the prosecution is not absolved of the duty to present a full case (there is still a full trial). And Two, prosecutors in civil law countries have limited power drop charges once they have been filed. This includes countries like Russia with very high crime rates, and countries like Japan and Germany where trials are equally fair if not fairer than in the United States.

-At the Federal level, the Justice Department of the United States spend $27.1 billion dollars (not just for prosecution, but for the FBI, the DEA, ect.) and the total budget of the federal courts was $6.91 billion, drops in the bucket compared to the total federal budget. State government spending on Prosecution and the Courts is the same proportion to their total budgets. However, I would guess that even without plea bargains, you could get away with spending even less money by cutting drug laws, family law and regulatory law out of the equation

I realize that I spelled trial as trail. I hope no one was confused or thought their right to a fair trail was at any risk.

(Edited by Liam Joseph Thornback on 10/08, 6:02pm)

If criminal law were an area I was working to improve, I'd put most of my focus on defining individual rights carefully, and ensuring that not a single line of criminal law was left standing that didn't refer to a violation of an individual right.  Do that and the vast number of criminal cases never come into being in the first place.

 

To answer your question directly, I don't think that the power of a prosecutor to negotiate with a suspect and his attorney to accept a lessor charge in exchange for a guilty plea, as such, is violating anyone's right to a fair trial.  BUT I do think that the system is still far from being an ideal of objective law - it needs much more tweaking and this looks like an area where that could be done.

That was close to what I was thinking when I wrote this post. There is a lot of other work to be done in the criminal law system, in the United States, Canada and elsewhere, and I wonder if plea bargains would still be as important after all that.

However, I still question the merit of plea bargains and whether they violate rights or not. In my home country of Canada, plea agreements must be approved by the judge (which the almost always are), and that got me thinking; could you take away the plea agreement power away from the prosecutor and give it to the presiding judge, reducing the incentive of the prosecutor to overcharge? That's just a thought.

Another issue is guilty pleas in general. When someone pleas guilty, do they automatically go to jail? Is evidence still presented and recorded? Is there still a full jury trial? As I said earlier, countries have all sorts of different policies regarding guilty pleas, which one makes more sense is hard to answer. I lean in favor of full trials for all criminal cases, but here are so many technical issues regarding juries, prosecutor and court time, and the patience of the defendants, that I have no good answers for.