Professor John Gross recently wrote in a guest op-ed for Al.com that police and prosecutors are constantly urging legislatures to give them “overly broad” and “unnecessarily punitive” laws to help fight crime.
The result is 94 percent of criminal convictions are the result of guilty pleas.
“Plea bargaining, something that occurs largely without judicial supervision, has effectively ended trial by jury,” Gross wrote.
“In order to have a criminal justice system that disposes of cases through pleas instead of trials there need to be powerful incentives for those accused of crimes to waive their constitutional rights. That is why prosecutors push for crimes to be broadly defined and for sentences to be harsh.”
For more, read “Drug Laws Are Designed to Demand Guilty Pleas, Not to Find Justice.”
