Well, I'm not quite sure how much I'm adding to the content of this page; however, I'm hoping to spark some further discussion on this topic.There just seems to be something wrong with the whole plea-bargain concept.
Case 1: You let someone off easy because it's cheaper than actually going through a trial, or you need their cooperation to catch a bigger fish in the pond.
Case 2: Someone who's innocent, pleas guilty to something they didn't do because they can't afford to risk being found guilty and having to face to full penalty.This seems like a lose-lose situation. Either we (society in general) lose because we're letting a guilty person get off lightly, or an innocent person loses because can either plead guilty to something he didn't do, or face the consequences.
Occasionally there arises a situation where someone who is guilty, pleas their way to a reduced charge by testifying against someone who is innocent.
I realize that no system is perfect, but in today's world, one would hope that things would be better. I guess that this is an improvement over torture, but I'm not sure by how much.
Side question for Philip: Do you feel that you got more out of this than a B- (Isn't education about more than grades?)? Would you (are you planning to) take any more law classes?
Reading about your law-school experiences has made me glad that the law firm I work for (in computer tech support), does not practice criminal law.
-- Geoffrey S. Kane, December 8, 1997
"What if?". That's a question we all ask, at one time or another. Some to a merely conservative point, and some to an extreme... Seeing all of this money, and power jockeyed around by these mostly wide-eyed folk, I can't help but to wonder if maybe we took a good thing, a "protection" to promote safety and fairness to all, and went too far. It's not really about justice anymore. It's about fame, and power, and sensationalism, and controversy, and most of all, money. You can't be the President without it. And this is what we can be... Without it.
-- Dan Fullerton, June 14, 1998
I have no way of knowing whether B- is a reasonable grade or not for this paper. If it is, then I probably haven't learned much about law and justice from it. If it isn't, I don't know what I've learned. Is the argument not expressed in a lawyerly way? Are the conclusions grossly incorrect? Are the referenced decisions misinterpreted?If the professor gave written comments, it would be interesting to see them (with her permission, I guess, although that's not ethically or legally clear).
It would also be interesting to see what an "A" answer was.
-s
PS As an MIT undergraduate, I also crossregistered at Harvard for things not offered at MIT. For instance, biology at a level above that of the cell. I did learn some physiology in that course, but I also learned something about pre-meds, since it turns out that very few people take this course because they're budding scientists.‰
-- Stavros Macrakis, October 16, 1998
I'm not at all sure that Geoffrey Kane is justified in feeling ethically safe because he works in corporate law. On a case by case basis of his own experience, his judgement is probably correct. But it seems to me that immense miscarriages of corporate justice occur and injure more of us than those in criminal law. But they're too technical for the news media to understand, or at least present. The level of monopoly power presently tolerated and encouraged by the law means that I suspect the farmer who grows your breakfast cereal gets a smaller cut of the price paid by the consumer than Phil Greenspun gets out of dead-tree publishing.
-- Albert Rogers, June 14, 2000
This isn't my idea, but one suggested by a professor: perhaps taking the institutional element away from the public defender and district attorney's office would lessen the dangers of the plea bargaining system. It seems to me that DAs and PDs get entrenched into one side or the other, and lose sight of how the system as a whole is supposed to work. If the DA and PD offices were abolished and the government instead spent the money to appoint an attorney (randomly) to prosecute and an attorney (randomly) to defend, each of the attorneys coming from a common pool of criminal law attorneys, the war-zone atmosphere would be lessened (my county has this problem) and a defendant wouldn't be stuck with the stigma of having a public defender instead of a "real attorney." Such a setup could result in less of a caseload building up on any one attorney, and lessen the pressure on defense attorneys to settle fast. It would also reduce the hostility defendants have when they see their attorney being nice to the DA, because the defendants would know that no attorney spends his or her life just putting people behind bars; today's prosecutor could be the defendant's attorney for the next case.Of course it could be unworkable. Any ideas?
-- Adam Ramirez, May 1, 2006