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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rickyb" data-source="post: 4815297" data-attributes="member: 56035">[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-mirage-of-justice/[/URL]the truth can hurt"The reality is that almost no one who is imprisoned in America has gotten a trial. There is rarely an impartial investigation. <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/why-innocent-people-plead-guilty/%20" target="_blank">A staggering 97 percent</a> of all federal cases and 95 percent of all state felony cases are resolved through plea bargaining. Of the 2.2 million people we have incarcerated at the moment—25 percent of the world’s prison population—2 million never had a trial. And significant percentages of them are innocent. Judge Jed S. Rakoff in an article in The New York Review of Books titled <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/why-innocent-people-plead-guilty/" target="_blank">“Why Innocent People Plead Guilty”</a> explains how this secretive plea system works to thwart justice. Close to 40 percent of those eventually exonerated of their crimes originally pleaded guilty, usually in an effort to reduce charges that would have resulted in much longer prison sentences if the cases had gone to trial. The students I teach in prison who have the longest sentences are usually the ones who demanded a trial. Many of them went to trial because they did not commit the crime. But if you go to trial you cannot bargain away any of the charges against you in exchange for a shorter sentence. The public defender—who spends no more than a few minutes reviewing the case and has neither the time nor the inclination to do the work required by a trial—uses the prospect of the harshest sentence possible to frighten the client into taking a plea deal. And, as depicted in “Making a Murderer,” prosecutors and defense attorneys often work as a tag team to force the accused to plead guilty. If all of the accused went to trial, the judicial system, which is designed around plea agreements, would collapse. And this is why trial sentences are horrific. It is why public attorneys routinely urge their clients to accept a plea arrangement. Trials are a flashing red light to the accused: DO NOT DO THIS. It is the inversion of justice....the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2016/jan/15/the-injustice-system-part-two-tyra-patterson-trial-michelle-lai-dayton-ohio-us-prisons%20" target="_blank">Guardian newspaper reported</a>: “The <a href="http://www.innocenceproject.org/causes-wrongful-conviction/false-confessions-or-admissions%20" target="_blank">Innocence Project</a> has kept detailed records on the 337 cases across the [United States] where prisoners have been exonerated as a result of DNA testing since 1989. The group’s researchers found that false confessions were made in 28 percent of all the DNA-related exonerations, a striking proportion in itself. But when you look only at homicide convictions—by definition the most serious cases—false confessions are the leading cause of miscarriages of justice, accounting for a full 63% of the 113 exonerations.”"</blockquote>

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