the imbroglio

Blonde Justice (who, sadly, is leaving our PD ranks soon) has been hosting a great conversation about how many people who plead guilty really are and whether courts allow no-contest and Alford pleas. Some great stuff in there, not least this from an anonymous commenter who says he/she practices in St. Louis:

in my jurisdiction judges no not really enhance punishment if a defendant exercises his right to a jury trial.

Wouldn’t that be nice!? We’d have a helluva lot more trials if that were the case in my jurisdiction. It’s very discouraging how much of our criminal justice system ends up resting on mythical principles that turn out in practice to be basically empty platitudes , e.g., “right to trial by jury” and “presumption of innocence.” Here, if you “waste” a court’s time by exercising your right to trial when “everybody” knows you’re guilty, well, you better be ready to get double or triple or more punishment than you could have expected prior to the trial. Justice? Constitutional rights? What are those things?

In this jurisdiction judges commonly take nolo/no-contest pleas; it’s the prosecutors you have to convince. The prosecutors seem to decide on a case-by-case basis whether they’ll take such a plea, and it’s not clear to me what makes the difference. Sometimes I suspect it comes down to whether they think such a plea will make the difference between getting a conviction by plea and having to go to trial, but I really haven’t figured it out.