Why Innocent People Plead Guilty

The Founding Fathers lauded jury trial as a truth-seeking mechanism that achieves fairness and protects against tyranny. However, the United States’ overwhelmed criminal justice system has since become one almost exclusively of pleas. As crime drastically increased nationwide during the 1970s and 1980s, state and federal legislatures increased the penalties for criminal violations. Congress imposed strict mandatory-minimum sentencing laws and introduced the once-binding Sentencing Guidelines to avoid disparities in punishment. Gradually, charging and sentencing power shifted from judges to prosecutors, who may now effectively coerce information-deprived criminal defendants into accepting plea bargains. Prosecutors can charge the most severe offenses provable and, if defendants exercise their right to jury trial instead of agreeing to plead guilty, can significantly enhance their sentences. The current plea-bargaining system is one-sided and tremendously unregulated, for most negotiations occur behind closed doors and beyond the review of judges. Risk-averse innocent defendants—frightened and equipped with limited resources—plead guilty to crimes they never committed to avoid more-severe punishments at trial. Between two and eight percent of the United States’ 2.2 million convicted felons are actually innocent. Although Alford pleas allow defendants to maintain their innocence, a plea-bargaining process in which judges are actively involved may reduce the number of false guilty pleas more effectively.

“The pressure of the situation may cause an innocent defendant to make a less-than-rational appraisal of his chances for acquittal and thus decide to plead guilty when he not only is actually innocent but also could be proven so.”