The problem:
Most of us have heard stories of people who were accused of a crime and were offered a plea deal that was a slap on the wrist while being threatened with prosecution for a serious crime if they didn’t confess. This is an obvious injustice. Instead of having to demonstrate that a defendant committed a crime, prosecutors are using the process as the punishment to force confessions. How do we know that people actually did the thing they confessed to if they were going to face serious charges for not confessing?
The challenge to solving this problem is that the justice system simply doesn’t have the time and money to prosecute every case, but is that really an acceptable excuse? Are we going to throw out justice because it’s too expensive?
My proposed solution, in addition to adding resources for more trials is the following.
When evaluating prosecuting attorneys performance on the job judge as follows:
- Consider a plea deal based confession to be a very minor good result.
- Consider a trial based conviction to be a major victory (worth hundreds more toward evaluation of success).
- Require the recording of any settlement offers including the proposed prosecution if the settlement was not accepted. If the exact prosecution was not pursued fully consider that a blight on the prosecutor’s record.
- If a prosecutor fails to secure a conviction for the proposed prosecution consider this a blight on the prosecutor’s record.
A. Caveat to this would be if the prosecutor notifies their supervisor/evaluator and informs them that new evidence has come to light and if the new evidence was not available to the prosecutor when making the plea offer there should be no penalty to the prosecutor’s record for dropping the case. This should be considered a minor good result (if the information was truly unavailable) as dropping an unjust case is a good result.
Obviously when I say “blight” I don’t mean lose three cases and you’re out. I simply mean that evaluation of prosecutors should reflect that if they offer a deal under the threat of prosecution they had better have strong evidence to support that prosecution. Strong enough that they’re going to win more often than they lose.