FRONTLINE: the Plea

Very scary episode of Frontline on the Plea barganing system in the US. Basically 95% of guilty verdicts are the result of plea bargains due to the low quality / high cost of a jury trial. This is not so good because a plea bargain (as the name suggests) is about barganing and not about innocence. It also makes it much harder to correct problems down the road because the person has pled guilty to the crime even if they were railroaded into it - the scariest parts of the episode was cases where the judge and the prosecutor gang up to get someone to take a plea. You would think this is grounds for an automatic appeal (the judge isn't supposed to care who wins, remember) but you cannot (or at least it's much harder) to appeal a guilty plea rather than a guily verdict. One thing that wasn't mentioned is why the judicial system has had to revert to this system - volume. The war on drugs has given the US the highest incarceration rates in the world. Given all of this, you can't really be suprised the quality of justice for everyone has gone down the toilet.