

Chances of being found not guilty - eli_awry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_legal_system#Chances_of_being_found_not_guilty

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byoung2
The system is set up to push people toward plea bargains. Even an innocent
person charged with first degree murder and facing 25 to life would consider a
plea of involuntary manslaughter with a sentence as short as 3 years. Over 90%
of trials in the US end in a plea bargain...I wonder how many people take a
plea when they are innocent.

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coopdog
As unethical as it would be, a scientific experiment to replicate the system
closely and charge people with falsified crimes to find out the percentages
who admit guilt while knowing they're innocent.. it potentially really could
save thousands of innocent people

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eli_awry
Another interesting thing would be to let the plea-bargain cases go to trial,
with a moot outcome and see how many come up not guilty. Unfortunately, it
would be very difficult to motivate lawyers to argue their hardest.

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zoowar
Another way to look at it is that district attorneys are doing their job and
only prosecuting cases with solid evidence to back them up.

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malandrew
... and also making sure a certain percentage of innocent people end up in
jail because they use the maximum sentence threat to squeeze out plea bargains
from innocent people.

Their job is justice and the truth first, not prosecution at any cost and
willfully ignorant of the facts or willfully uninterested in the facts.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way they started doing the latter
erroneously equating with it being the correct path towards the former.

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zoowar
Agreed, plea bargains should be based on charges, not sentences.

