Been listening to a bunch of true crime podcasts lately. More often than not, the person accused of a horrific crime, is offered some sort of reduced sentence, in exchange for a guilty plea. I know part of the reason is to spare the victim(s) and their families the trauma of going through a trial. It just seems pointless when they have so much evidence to convict them and give them a harsher sentence, especially considering how many people rarely serve the full sentence. I get it but I also don’t.
In: Other
There are two reasons.
The first is that there isn’t simply enough manpower to actually prosecute so many people. Were many defendants not offered plea deals, that would inherently increase the amount of hours used to get a conviction and each prosecutor would have less time to prepare itself on the case, and their conviction rates would likely plummet.
The second one is that in reality, the prosecutors hate going into court because going into court means some of their cases will get a *not guilty* verdict and this makes them look incompetent, while getting a plea deal is seen as a success to the general public. Research on federal courts, which likely have a higher conviction rate than state courts, *only* have a 83% conviction rate when trials are actually done.
TL; DR: Prosecutors don’t want a big pile of cases and they don’t like their conviction rates decreased when they go to trial. Offering plea deals is less about sparing families and more about sparing their own work pile and their credibility.
It saves prosecutors time (which might be their most precious resource since they have other cases to get to), and completely eliminates the risk of acquittal, mistrial, and appeals against the conviction.
Because trials are very expensive and you literally only need to convince 1 person out of 12 that you might not be guilty and you get to walk free. A plea deal is security for the prosecutor that they will get a conviction and the person will do fine. In the case of true crime, you’re probably talking about someone getting convicted or one or more murders. If it’s a serial killer for example, they’ll plead down to life in prison and never be a free person again in order to avoid the death penalty. So instead of a months long trial that costs millions of dollars, and the nonzero possibility that the guy walks free, you get an open and shut resolution where the guy stays in jail forever.
Guilty pleas are convictions, and DAs are elected on conviction records. A win is a win and easy wins beat hard fought wins. Hard fought wins means hard work and the risk of loss.
In addition to what everybody else has said, the risk associated with the trial outcome influences the plea deal in the same way it influences the settlement in civil cases. If there’s a mountain of evidence against you, you and the prosecution will both know that you’re looking at a long sentence, so you won’t get as favorable a plea deal.
I think it’s an overworked American court system thing.
In my country there isn’t a lot of plea bargaining going on for anything even remotely serious, you just get a moderate discount in sentencing if you plead guilty, mostly because it’s the most tangible sign of remorse.
To avoid an even larger backlog of court cases, plea deals are given to avoid trials. It’s not feasible for every case to have a jury trial.
Simply because it saves time and money. The District Attorney has a limited budget and so does the Department of Corrections. It’s cheaper to just throw them in jail for a few years than go through a lengthy litigation process.
Plea deals can give finality – no post-conviction appeal, give some sense of closure to a victim’s family.
Have you served on a jury?
It takes time, it costs money, and once you go to court there’s no guarantee how things will shake out (a person can clearly be in the wrong and get off because a juror refused to vote against their beliefs regarding the criminal justice system, they can decide that even with evidence they think the defendant was justified, etc).
And on the more sneaky side of things, please deals can contain all kinds of sneaky stipulations that a defendant might not realize their signing on for.
Latest Answers