[lbo-talk] The Death of the American Trial

Dennis Claxton ddclaxton at earthlink.net
Wed Oct 17 00:02:53 PDT 2012


On 10/16/2012 11:49 PM, andie_nachgeborenen wrote:


> Bill is right that In America defendants are essentially blackmailed into waiving any trial at all, including a bench trial, and pleading guilty, first because of disproportionate sentences, and secondmbecause you get, in a system like the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which almost 40 states have, a credit for acceptance of responsibility, or conversely, a penalty for holding the state to its standard of proof and insisting on your right to a trial, that can mean several less or more years in jail. The Supreme Court has found both of these practices to be constitutional.

All that is true. I would add that acceptance of responsibility more than often includes the element of cooperation.

But it is also true that the Feds don't bring cases they are not as close to 100% sure as possible that they can win. As we discussed in another thread a couple weeks ago, they bring far fewer cases than local authorities and when they do bring one they are loaded for bear. I've worked a few dozen run of the mill drug cases where discovery runs thousands of pages and hours and upon hours of wiretap recordings.

That has no bearing on any of what you say here. It is true that people are blackmailed into a plea bargain. I'm only pointing out that pleading guilty generally does not preclude being guilty.

That of course brings up another problem, which is that there are far far too many things to be guilty of in this land of the brave and the home of the free. Or, as William Burroughs put it, this nation of finks.



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