You are missing the point here. People that are quite possibly innocent when intimidated with 'plead guilty and you get 5 years or try for innocence and we'll hit you with 50' will choose the 5 years guilty plea because they do not have the power of the state at their disposal to fight.

This means that instead of justice being about truth finding it ends up being about conviction rates, which is gamifying the justice system in a way that is very detrimental to society. Couple it with such things as three strikes laws, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_compl... and a system that is punitive rather than corrective and you have a major problem.

Plea bargaining could be put to good use but in practice it is used as a means of intimidation and to short-circuit the justice system.

> Adding an alternative is not coercion.

It's not simply the existence plea bargains that is coercion, I don't think anyone would argue that, and it's easy to find situations where plea bargains can be good things.

But, this is not the point of the criticism - it is also easy to think of situations where plea bargains could be used to distort justice rather than to make it efficient. Wikipedia has a good discussion of this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargains#Controversy .

You can disagree that these criticisms are a problem in practice, that is fine and something that could be discussed, but you must recognise that plea bargains could in principle be used in a coercive way, and that many people fear that this happens in practice.

What I'm not understanding is the difference.

What is the substantial difference of facing a possible 50 years for breaking some law, vs facing a possible 50 years for breaking some law (but we'll give you 10 if you plead guilty)?

The penalty faced, the court case, none of that changes because you have a prosecutor that says "you face (max sentence) if you go to trial" - which is a factual statement, judges have great leeway in setting sentences between minimum and maximum within the guidelines.

So again, where's the coercion? The fundamental dynamic of a person pleading their case in court, with the possibility of a lot of time in prison if they lose, has not changed due to the existence of the alternative.

Aaron Swartz was in trouble the moment the system got ahold of him, not the moment the prosecutor said he could be facing the maximum sentence in prison.

You are taking two steps at the time. A trial is supposed to determine your guilt and give you a fair shot at mounting a defense. Since hardly anybody can afford to go on a frontal collision course with the Federal government you'll see people pleading 'guilty' when in fact they are not. The few that take their chances with the justice process are then thrown the book at and then some in a strange kind of revenge for not accepting the plea bargain.

Even if they win it will leave them bankrupt.

From your words it is almost as if you think that there is no cost for the defendants associated with accepting the plea or the existence of the plea, but in real life there most definitely is. All of the resources of the system can be brought to bear on those few that have the temerity to refuse the plea.

You are looking at plea bargains on an individual / Case-by-Case basis.

The problem arises when you view the system dynamics as a whole. The government using plea bargains to minimize the number of cases that go to trial (over 96% of the cases never go to trial). That allows them to spend significantly more on each case that does go to trial. That significant expenditure increase dramatically increases the likelihood of a guilty verdict.

As much as we would like to believe than the amount of money spent by each side doesn't truly determine the outcome of court cases (and elections, patents applications, etc), that would be naive. It's similar to why we need public defenders to ensure a fair trial.

The result is a situation where a minority of cases go to trial, the government virtually always wins them (in large part due to having spent more money on them). That success rate is used to frighten everyone else into taking plea bargains, which reinforces the system.

Just to prove this, imagine if the rates were reversed and 96% of people went to trial. That increased case load would significantly hinder the ability of the prosecutors, and the conviction rate at trial would decrease dramatically. This would then encourage people to go to trial more, causing a reinforcement effect in the other direction.

I'm not necessarily advocating that everyone go to trial and increase the costs of prosecution because the pendulum might swing too much the other way and our justice system could fail to secure important guilty verdicts.

I do think that there is a massive asymmetry currently between public defenders and prosecutors that is to the detriment of society (exploding prison populations, devastated inner city communities, etc). This system of plea bargains is a large part of this asymmetry due to its effects on per case resource expenditure).

This would be an interesting economics / criminal justice model to create. Creating a simplified, theoretical model on the effect of expenditure on verdict, and then using game theory to find the equilibrium plea bargain rates and predicted number of incorrect verdicts (both false positives and false negatives).

"You can plea to this crime and be sentence to 2 years in prison, or we'll charge you with a felony instead of a misdemeanor and several extra things to drive your minimum sentence up to 5 years."

I would be much more okay with plea bargains if the system required that the prosecutor only allow you to plea to charges they had filed against you, and refused to allow them to file more serious versions of the charges once they offered a bargain, ie, that the bargain was exclusively setting the terms of the sentence for the crimes you were being charged for in exchange for not forcing a trial to determine your guilt.