Plea Bargaining Is It Really Necessary?

How would you feel if you got punished for using your right to freedom of religion? If you said good, then you’re weird. If you said bad then how would you feel if you got punished for exercising another right, let’s say trial by jury. Well it happens all the times in America’s courts today. This is why plea bargaining in the United States is Illegal.

The Constitution declares “The trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment; shall be by jury.” That is the sixth amendment. The Fifth Amendment is the right to not incriminate oneself in a system that says the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. Just the Idea of plea bargaining, let alone the practice, violates these three critical things. Not only was this understood until after the great depression when bench trials were allowed only to relieve the stress of finding a jury. It was greatly discouraged until a recent phenomenon called “you scratch my back I’ll sue yours because you did it wrong” (that’s a quote from me by the way) has increased the numbers of trials exponentially. In 1874 the U.S. Supreme court stated “that a defendant could not be tried in any other manner than by a jury of twelve men, although he may consent in open court to be tried by a jury of 11 men.” The U.S. Supreme court of 1874 states that there is only 1 type of trail acceptable and legal in the United States and that is trail by jury. So why do we listen to the Supreme Court of 1970’s decision to uphold plea bargaining? Is it just because they are more recent? What makes men that are of a more recent time smarter? How is a more recent court more in touch with the writers of our constitution? This decision by the Supreme Court of 1970 is a slap in the face to our founding fathers and to democracy. Because plea bargaining breaks the checks and balances placed for us by our founding fathers to protect us from the government. It is there as a safeguard. It also prevents the government from forcing us to say something to receive a lesser punishment. For example to plead guilty to a crime when the justice systems job is to prove your guilty. To plead guilty violates the Fifth Amendment, and by the logic that the constitution is the base for our laws it is then a crime to plead guilty at all. Not only is the court breaking the constitution by offering you a plea bargain, but you break the Fifth Amendment by accepting it. So please don’t accept a plea bargaining because then you have committed a crime they can prove.

The use of plea bargaining also punishes those that exercise their right to trial by giving them harsher sentences. Timothy Lynch director of the Cato Institute’s Project on criminal justice had this to say “Plea bargaining rests on the constitutional fiction that our government does not retaliate against individuals who wish to exercise their right to trial by jury.” This is completely unjust and violates the supreme court of 1970’s ruling that plea bargaining is constitutional if the defendant is not punished for doing so. Chief Judge William G. Young of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts, for example, recently had this to say ”Evidence of sentencing disparity visited on those who exercise their Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury is today stark, brutal, and incontrovertible.… Today, under the Sentencing Guidelines regime with its vast shift of power to the Executive, that disparity has widened to an incredible 500 percent. As a practical matter this means, as between two similarly situated defendants, that if the one who pleads and cooperates gets a four-year sentence, then the guideline sentence for the one who exercises his right to trial by jury and is convicted will be 20 years. Not surprisingly, such a disparity imposes an extraordinary burden on the free exercise of the right to an adjudication of guilt by one’s peers. Criminal trial rates in the United States and in this District are plummeting due to the simple fact that today we punish peopleвЂ"punish