Plea Bargains Quotes

[The defendant] has an absolute, unqualified right to compel the State to investigate its own case, find its own witnesses, prove its own facts, and convince the jury through its own resources. Throughout the process, the defendant has a fundamental right to remain silent, in effect challenging the State at every point to “Prove it!”

When a prosecutor makes a deal with someone and gives him immunity if he testifies, the prosecutor usually gets the testimony he wants.

Without very draconian penalties it would be very difficult to flip someone and control organized crime.

It is true that no man is above the law but neither should any man be asked to break the law in order to buy his freedom.

Prosecutors, unlike any other official in our system, … are not as accountable… to the public that they serve Police officers do what they do in a public space. Judges are in a courtroom... Prosecutors make their charging decisions and plea bargain decisions behind closed doors…. There is no transparency … There is a lot of unconscious and implicit bias.

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.

We have far more plea bargains in our system than we do trials.

A lot of the problems we have in our criminal-justice system, you know, the problem of over-incarceration, the problem of prosecutorial abuse, the problem of just this sort of mass crop of people, of plea bargains, they all have to do with the system being overloaded. If crime was lower, many of the problems would go away.