Pleas, No More

Here's a story I missed while I was away:

Randall Ritnour, a Nebraska District Attorney, announced last week that he will no longer accept plea bargains after February 1. It's a radical move from a DA whose jurisdiction saw the exoneration of six people in single case in 2008, and one that will be closely watched.

Ritnour says he will charge defendants with the crimes he believes they committed, instead of playing the usual game of trumping up charges to extract a plea bargain for lesser charges and avoid a costly, time-consuming trial. This move could mean fewer prosecutions, and could sharply reduce wrongful convictions, since prosecutors will only bring charges they believe they can prove in front of a jury. He says the decision wasn't solely influenced by the exonerations of the "Beatrice Six," but that the case did play a role in his decision.

In the "Beatrice Six" case, five of six defendants in a murder case pled guilty to a murder they didn't commit and implicated another man, Joseph White, in order to avoid a possible death sentence if they were convicted at trial. They were cleared by DNA testing last year.

Ritnour was not involved in the prosecution of the Beatrice Six, but oversaw their exonerations:

"You can't help but have something like that influence your thinking to some extent," Ritnour (said). "Hopefully, this would limit the potential for that kind of mistake to happen again. Our point is to do the right thing, and the right thing is to charge people with the crime they actually committed, not to bounce around making deals."

Ritnour is to be commended for his courage in announcing this plan. The only problem: it can't work on any scale unless we spend billions more on our courts, and that ain't happening anytime soon. The always-thoughtful Scott Greenfield writes at Simple Justice that a plan like this couldn't work across the country. It's a sad fact, but our system simply can't handle trying even 20% of the cases we charge.

Plea bargaining, for all its many flaws and horribly coercive nature, has a purpose.  Our legal system lacks the facilities and finances to try most cases, and depends on the vast majority of cases to "go away" via a plea to allow it to work.  While this may not necessarily be desirable, it is a reality that government relies upon in budgeting and building.  Change the equation by forcing the vast majority of cases to trial and the system can't withstand the burden.