Currently the US legal system (at least, certainly in many other places as well) has a system of plea bargaining - if you are charged with a crime the prosecutor can offer to reduce the charge to a lesser one in return for a guilty plea.
I think this is a huge infringement of rights and is the fundamental cause of a great many miscarriages of justice. I would like to see the practice ended. While it does reduce the burden on the courts, this should not be the primary concern of the justice system. The one and only concern of the justice system should be uncovering the truth and protecting innocent people.
If we didn't care about protecting innocent people, the courts would not be needed at all - the police would just be able to arrest anyone they liked and lock them up for as long as they liked. Obviously that would be awful. The courts are the check on this system - making sure that only people who have actually committed crimes end up in prison.
Overworked, underpaid public defenders will often advise innocent people to plead guilty because they would have little chance of being found innocent by the court. This is an obviously disastrous state of affairs.
Plea bargains wouldn't be so bad if public defenders were actually adequate, but public defenders secure acquittals at a much lower rate than more costly lawyers. This is also obviously disastrous - there's essentially once justice system for the rich and one for the poor, and the one for the rich is much more lenient and forgiving. There's a simple way to fix this (although of course it does require spending enough money to get a functional system) - pick a sampling of publicly defended defendants at random and give them a highly-paid lawyer. If the public defenders do worse, increase the amount of money spent on the public defense system until the difference is no longer statistically significant. The randomness is important because there may be statistically significant differences between the crime rates of wealthy and impoverished people (in fact, this seems highly likely - poverty causes desperation and desperate people take desperate measures).
A third cause of massive injustice seems to me to be how long it takes to get a trial - some people languish in prison for months and even years without ever having been found guilty (the more well off can usually obtain bail). I think all trials should be set for no more than 48 hours after arrest (maybe a week tops if there are extenuating circumstances, like a key witness in a murder case being elusive). The average should be no more than 24 hours. If you don't have the evidence to prosecute someone after that time you shouldn't have arrested them in the first place. The entire bail system should be made unnecessary and scrapped.
Injustices (especially injustices like these that predominantly affect the less well-off portion of society) have the unfortunate side effect of increasing inequality - someone who is imprisoned awaiting trial can't earn money to improve his situation, and being convicted of a crime substantially reduces one's future prospects.
My proposed reforms would be expensive, but I think not unaffordable to a rich country like the US. I think eventually they will happen, as these injustices become less tolerated by society.
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