Word: plead
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Your article on plea bargaining overlooks a basic fact: that it is the right of the defendant to plead guilty as well as to go to trial. The real question is whether by pleading guilty the defendant gains any substantial advantage. A recent study by the Institute for Law and Social Research (INSLAW) shows that those criminals pleading guilty do not gain any particular advantage either in the length of punishment or the seriousness of the crime to which they plead...
...with a pair of glasses so thick that he keeps walking into things? I hate to admit it, but I did. Will you giggle helplessly when an assassin hands Sellers a round, black bomb with a sizzling fuse and tells him it's a special delivery package? Again, I plead guilty. How does Edwards get away with this old schtik? By keeping, I believe, his technique straightforward and limp, with no shock-cutting or screwy camera angles to jar us. Most of his shots are familiar medium-close-ups, underscored by Henry Mancini's familiar, likable Muzak...
...reality, as anyone involved with criminal justice can attest to, is far different. In the vast majority of cases, the accused has no trial. His "day" in court is the few minutes it takes him to plead guilty. "Here we have an elaborate jury trial system, and only 10% of the accused get to use it," says Colorado Law School Professor Albert H. Alschuler. "That's like solving America's transportation problems by giving | 10% Cadillacs and making the rest go barefoot." For most defendants, justice is done by way of a deal: a guilty plea in exchange...
...loads, Alaska courts had sufficient slack to absorb more trials. Efficiency techniques instituted 16 months before the ban continued to whittle down court delay. More careful screening out of weak cases also helped. But the main reason Alaska's courts could keep up is that defendants continued to plead guilty in droves. The percentage of accused choosing to exercise their right to trial increased only from 6.7% to 9.6%. Why? "Because defendants know they have nothing to gain by going to trial," says Stevens Clarke, a University of North Carolina professor of public law and government who monitored...
...acknowledged Clarke, the Alaska ban did not change the status quo all that much, and the merits of what it did change are open to debate. But the Alaska experience does underscore a blunt reality of criminal justice. As Chicago Law School Dean Norval Morris puts it, "Most defendants plead guilty because they are guilty." And if that is so, say Morris and others, perhaps the real question is not so much whether plea bargaining deprives the accused of his right to a jury trial, but whether he gets a fair and rational sentence...