Plea Bargaining In The Criminal Justice System

In a criminal justice system defined by the maxim “innocent until proven guilty,” it’s both humiliating and laughably ironic that over 97% of cases that make it to court are still prematurely abridged (Walsh). In these, defendants are never aided by an attorney, tried in front of a jury, or even sentenced by a judge. Rather, these cases end with a plea bargain: an agreement struck between a defendant and a prosecutor that trades an admission of guilt in exchange for a lighter sentence. In stark contrast with the original, constitutional ideals of due process, plea bargaining has attracted both vocal critics and stanch sponsors; the former alleging that it’s violates the integrity of our judicial system, and the latter defending it as a component without which our entire system would collapse. In order to reach a judicial system that better upholds our ideals of justice, plea bargaining ought to be abolished in the United States. It’s unquestionable that the objective of the criminal justice …show more content…
Critics argue that because bargains so drastically reduce sentence lengths, without them, prison populations would skyrocket. However, the exact opposite is true. In 2016, the National Registry of Exonerations found that 46% of all exonerations in 2016 came from people who had originally pled guilty (“Exonerations”). The reason our prisons are so excessively populated is because, among the wrongfully convicted, half were there because they were intimidated into accepting a plea bargain. In other words, we put so much pressure on entirely innocent defendants that they plead guilty, thus forcing them into incarceration, wasting taxpayer dollars, and exacerbating our prison overcrowding predicament. Thus, eliminating the mispurposed tool of plea bargaining wouldn’t aggravate the problem; to the contrary, it would be the first step to a