![]() ![]() About 95% and 97% of state and federal criminal cases, respectively, are resolved via a plea bargain. In Santa Cruz, California, there were no criminal trials from 2010 until at least 2012. One Manhattan federal judge said he only recalled one criminal trial in his four years on the bench. ![]() Since SCOTUS approved plea bargaining in criminal proceedings, trials have virtually disappeared. “The number of federal criminal statutes was one-third larger in 2004 than it was in 1980.” Larkin, Jr., in a Harvard Law Review article. “According to the, more than forty percent of the federal criminal laws enacted since the Civil War have gone on the books since 1970,” wrote Paul J. “As a result, early courts were suspicious of plea bargaining.”Įfficiency in processing criminal cases, however, has been the main factor in allowing America’s criminal justice system to become a “system of pleas.” With overcriminalization came the need for courts to resolve cases without the burden and cost of a trail. “Plea bargaining became popular in the early twentieth century for two reasons: first, because it allowed judges and lawyers to hide their own corrupt practices-namely, using bribes to grant defendants a beneficial plea deal-and second, because the normalized use of pleas allowed the courts an efficient means of dealing with the burdens of a rapidly expanding criminal justice system,” wrote Johnson. In the 1920s, plea bargaining became commonplace, but it was not until 1970 that SCOTUS approved its use. Trials were deemed essential to America’s Founding Fathers. “The basic purpose of a trial is the determination of truth.” SCOTUS said in Tehan v. ![]() She then details three classifications of lies during plea bargaining: “lies about facts, lies about laws, and lies about process.” Finally, Johnson “demonstrates how the paradox of lies during plea bargaining, namely that the strategies lawyers have come up with to avoid the injustices of the system are the same strategies that make the system unknowable to those outside of it, thus allowing the core injustice of the criminal justice system to survive.” In a 52-page article, Johnson explores how trials constrain lying in criminal proceedings. Johnson notes that if plea bargaining were to disappear tomorrow, defendants would lose their means of avoiding “sex offender registration, deportation, severe prison sentences, fines,” and other consequences of being convicted upon the most severe charge a prosecutor can lodge based upon the facts of the case. Systematic “lying at plea bargaining allows defendants the opportunity to negotiate fair resolutions to their cases in the face of a deeply unfair system, even as that lying makes way for-and sustains-the problematic system it seeks to avoid,” wrote Thea Johnson, an associate professor at Rutgers Law School, in an article that appeared in the Georgia State University Law Review. Share: Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on G+ Share with email ![]()
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