Your question presumes that prosecutors are looking for the truth, right and wrong, innocence and guilt.
They are not.
Their job is to prosecute. Hence we've seen terrible stories about people prosecuted and jailed for years because prosecutors knowingly refuse to turn over exonerating evidence.
Judges are also part of this problem. They are paid by government. Their instructions (Rules of Criminal and Civil Procedure) come from government. They have often worked as prosecutors for the government. So their loyalty is to the government. We don't have an independent judiciary. It's been wholly captured by the government.
Getting to the question as to why the innocent plead guilty, when you're faced with the cost of an attorney it's often cheaper and easier to take a plea than to fight. The stress, emotional and mental toll of a legal fight are horrendous. And there is very little guarantee that a defendant will win.
The deck is stacked against you when you go to court. Prosecutors and judges are not there to have a colloquy about the law, the facts, the issues of the case, nor to debate the motivation and intent of the defendant. The prosecutor is there to win. The judge is there to ensure that the well-oiled machine keeps running and that jurors deliver the needed verdict.
>Your question presumes that prosecutors are looking for the truth, right and wrong, innocence and guilt.
>They are not.
>Their job is to prosecute
That's not entirely true. Their job (or at least their office's job) is also to decide when and where to seek prosecution. In theory, determining truth and innocence is a significant part of their job.
The trouble is when that runs up against a politicized, failure intolerant culture that would much rather reward a prosecutor with a strong string of wins (however questionable their methods) over one with the courage to simply present the best case they have and let the jury decide on the facts like they are supposed to.
> Their job (or at least their office's job) is also to decide when and where to seek prosecution. In theory, determining truth and innocence is a significant part of their job.
There are a couple of problems with this:
1. When everyone is guilty of something, prosecutorial discretion is a disaster, not a desirable feature of the system. It's nothing other than the power to bankrupt and/or imprison whoever you don't like.
2. They don't do things by assessing truth and innocence. When my great-grandfather's mind went, some member of another branch of the family got appointed conservator of his estate, and proceeded to embezzle over $600K in "gifts" to herself and her family. My mother discovered this by coincidence, assembled a huge pile of damning evidence, and went to a prosecutor, who said he wouldn't bother charging her because she was a middle-aged woman and getting a conviction would be almost impossible.
My mother ended up suing, and on advice of counsel settled for the documented value stolen, rather than the full legal liability (which is a multiple of the losses). The theory there, as I recall, was "judges hate it when you go to trial even after being offered a settlement, so you should take the settlement".
If a prosecutor's chief career metric is his conviction rate, then he doesn't have much incentive to reelease exonerating evidence.
I wonder if changing the rules would help. Releasing such evidence and causing the case to collapse would not reduce the conviction percentage. Perhaps it could even be counted as a win, increasing the metric, because justice was done.
A truly democratic government also represents the collective will of the people. In America, we don't have a truly democratic government, but I think it's close enough to hold, to the extent that the justice system serves the desire of the people for the appearance of justice. The people can't know whether justice is happening, so its appearance has to substitute for this knowledge. This feedback optimizes the system to provide this appearance. I think we see major shocks when independent research and especially new methodologies for examining evidence (like DNA) disrupt the appearance that the justice is what's actually happening to the expected degree.
Of course I understand the principles of an adversarial system of trials. My question was how did this lead to prosecutors believing their job is to seek convictions rather than justice.
Well, if the adversarial system is effective, then it's the combination of prosecutors driving for convictions and defense attorneys driving for acquittals that produces justice. Hypothetically, only the judge is concerned with justice. And even then, only obliquely, because they only oversee justice of the trial process, not justice in general.
There are fundamentalists in law, just like in religion. A conviction exonerates the lawyer from any responsibility for injustice. After all, the opponent was declared or admitted guilt. Just as a religious leader exonerates himself from responsibility for enabling pogrom or ethnic cleansing as being the written will of the almighty.
A striking incidence of Goodhart's Law: (though it's questionable if this was a good measure in the first place)
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Interestingly, even if we added wrongful conviction rates as a disincentive, it would probably not affect the end result. It isn't impressive being an 80% prosecutor. It's much better to aim to be a 95% prosecutor and take the risk of a wrongful prosecution. Go big or go home.
I wonder if there's a better way of determining if someone is good at a job. I mean, it is natural for us to like people who do really difficult things, but if many people take great risks, there's likely to be at least one who just happens to succeed due to circumstances. Did he succeed because he's better or because there's a 5% chance of succeeding and he just happened to do so? It seems like he succeeded against all odds, but what if that was just pure luck and it seems impressive because we don't see it as throwing a hundred darts (a hundred prosecutors) at a board and seeing one strike the bull's eye (one with no wrongful convictions)?
This isn't an entirely perverse incentive. For most crimes, I would imagine that prosecuting the correct perpetrator would be the one most likely to result in a conviction.
And rate, vs count, is also the correct metric. Unfortunately, prosecutors are often under a lot of pressure from the public (i.e., us) to put somebody away. What's a prosecutor to do after Nancy Grace tells us who the murderer is?
>I would imagine that prosecuting the correct perpetrator would be the one most likely to result in a conviction.
Why would you imagine that? Why would you assume that there was even a crime at all for there to be a 'correct perpetrator'?
>Unfortunately, prosecutors are often under a lot of pressure from the public (i.e., us) to put somebody away. What's a prosecutor to do after Nancy Grace tells us who the murderer is?
This is significant in the six cases a year that get big television coverage, but this has happened to millions of people and the media/public generally have little/nothing to do with it.
Of course it's always presented this way, but do voters really think this way? I surmise that a number of other factors are more important in elections than conviction rates.
And even if that were true, why charge obviously innocent people at all? Not charging them won't affect the conviction proportion.
They don't charge obviously innocent people. In the wrongful conviction context, you're usually talking about someone who had prior criminal history, was associated with bad people, and was in the area of the crime scene at the wrong time. Obviously they deserve justice, but it's not like police are charging random law-abiding citizens.
How obviously innocent would you like? How about playing in a youth league basketball game at the time of a murder, with the game on video provided by the team coach, and still ending up on death row at the age of 16. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareef_Cousin
edit - there is also Krishna Maharaj, who it seems was completely fitted up by the Florida police and who still has a life sentence despite 6 separate witnesses putting him 30 miles away from the murder he was originally sentenced to death for. http://www.reprieve.org.uk/cases/krishnamaharaj/
Or there is Dan Taylor, who's seemingly watertight alibi is that he was already in jail when the murder he was convicted for happened. Still didn't help him any despite police records confirming this - http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/chi-0112190353de...
Krishna Maharaj was definitely in the hotel room where the murder occurred before it happened and had business dealings with the victim that had gone poorly.
Dan Taylor gave a detailed confession.
I'm not saying they're guilty, but it's not like the cops just picked them up at random.
Dan Taylor didn't confess and then get picked up. Dan Taylor got picked up and then confessed to something it was clearly impossible for him to have done. Even if they proceed to convict you, the police do not think you are guilty if they have you in the cells at the time the crime occurred.
As for Krishna Maharaj, whether he knew the victim of the murder is fairly incidental to having 'admissions by former Miami police and those closely associated with law enforcement that they framed Maharaj and had a deal to help cover up Colombian cartel murders'.
The guy in that story was in possession of both the murder weapon and a ring taken from the victim. He was exonerated because the prosecutor failed to disclose evidence of a blood stain on the victims clothing that wasn't a match for his. That failure can't be condoned. But it's also ridiculous to act like the police just grabbed some guy off the street that was obviously innocent.
That's what I said about understanding what the injustices really are. The challenge isn't as simple as what you're saying: "just don't charge innocent people." The challenge is getting prosecutors to give defendants their due process, even when the defendants have damning evidence against them, when they have criminal records, when they are caught up in shady circumstances.
I read an article the other day about a guy who was convicted of murdering a pizza delivery driver in front of his wife and kids. There were questions about whether he had been the one to shoot, but there is no doubt that he and his friends were in the process of robbing the driver when one of their party shot the driver.
As I understand things, if an innocent (?) party dies while you're committing a felony, you're officially guilty of murder. I assume armed robbery of a pizza delivery guy is a felony (?), so why would the question of who pulled the trigger come up?
I don't actually like the you're-guilty-of-murder-if-your-cocriminal-kills-someone rule, but that seems like exactly the sort of case it's intended to work with.
There is, of course, the whole bell curve of erroneous outcomes. But you can't know a priori who are the genuinely innocent people. The reason justice reform is so hard is because it's hard to get police and prosecutors to assiduously assure people's due process rights when the overwhelming percentage of people they deal with are bad people.
I think prosecutorial misconduct is absolutely unacceptable. But I can also see why it happens, without assuming that it could only happen if large numbers of prosecutors were evil people who would convict someone they knew was innocent just to inflate their quota.
Yeah, I'm not shaking my pitchfork, I guess I'm thinking there is an interesting discussion to be had about how you make a system that is probably pretty good 10 or 100 or 1000 times better.
Or just target someone who you don't think will be able to adequately defend themselves, either in court or the press. Disproportionately, this means, poor people, minorities, immigrants, etc.
I think it's interesting that you have so many responses to your comment and none of them propose that possibility. Yes, there are corrupt prosecutors, or prosecutors who just don't care. But I think most of them do care, and think they're doing the right thing. The police won't arrest you unless they think you're probably guilty. The prosecutor won't go after you unless they think you're probably guilty. The evidence points in that direction, or else they wouldn't get far. You may be innocent, but they're not working on that angle. From where they sit, you look guilty, and things like exonerating evidence will be seen through that lens, as a way for a guilty person to go free, not a way for an innocent person to avoid punishment for a crime he didn't commit.
This is simultaneously reassuring (these are regular, good people) and terrifying (how do you fix the system then?).
That's the whole point of the system. Prosecutors are supposed to prosecute those they believe are guilty (of course that doesn't mean negligently or willfully ignoring evidence that points toward innocence). While the system is supposed to presume innocence until proven guilty, it's the job of the prosecutor to prove guilt.
It makes their job easier. If they have 100 cases to prosecute and they can get 95% to enter a plea deal, now they only have 5 cases to worry about. If 5% of those who plead guilty are actually innocent, the prosecutor doesn't really care because it's not a case he/she has to go to trial over.
The core of the adversarial system is that the prosecutor and defense are entirely one-sided, and the court acts as impartial referee. The opposite to this is the inquisitorial system where the court tries to find out information themselves.
I think the most basic explanation is that lower crime rates means fewer prosecutors. Prosecutors probably estimate (and probably accurately) that putting people in prison for certain crimes is politically popular. In some cases, I suspect prison and police lobbies can influence things.
Kickbacks from the prison-industrial complex, of course. They're bribed to ruin people's lives, but that's fine with the prosecutors themselves because they're sociopaths.
Most prosecutors do not seek to put innocent people in prison. Does it happen? Yes, they are people and people are not perfect. Some are far from perfect.
Why do prosecutors seek to put innocent people in prison? What's in it for them?