National News
Why Many Innocent People Plead Guilty To Crimes
March 25, 2014 posted by Steve Brownstein
“This isn’t surprising in one sense, because the vast majority of defendants who are convicted of felonies plead guilty instead of going to trial, almost always in return for plea bargains.
The reason they do is obvious.
If you are offered a plea bargain, the deal might be plead guilty and get one year in prison, or six months in the county jail.
Well in the same crime, if you reject the plea bargain and go to trial and are then convicted, you might get five years in prison, 10 years, maybe 25 years in prison.
What this reflects is that they’re getting more realistic.
And were recognizing that in some cases, even an innocent person will take that sort of deal rather than risk the extreme danger of going to trial.” by Samuel Gross
