Resolved: plea bargaining is systematicly unjust

On my 1st point (Monetary Savings), My opponent has conceded all 3 reasons (trials, legal fees, & prison) that plea bargaining results in substantial monetary savings each year and has only countered this point by saying that these monetary savings don’t matter because “Systematic justice should not have a price.” Unfortunately, PRO’s dream of a state that metes out “systematic justice” without concern for costs is nothing more than overly zealous idealism. Because we don’t live in a perfect world, justice for one person often comes at the expense of justice for another. The money saved from the many, many cases that are pled can be spent on increased law enforcement, quality legal counsel, and more and better prisons (we’re severely lacking in space as is), and those benefits far outweigh any reduction in sentencing. On my 2nd point (Justice for the Criminal), First, I argue that a criminal who is willing to confess to his crime deserves lesser punishment than one who is not. This claim seems to me rather intuitive (and to my opponent, too, apparently, since he has not refuted it). Against this argument, PRO only claims that “The defendant is pealing guilty to a LESSER crime simply to elude charges to a harsher crime,” but this claim is only substantiated by a single example. PRO places the burden on himself to show that plea bargaining is systematically unjust, and proving that one sort of plea (to a lesser crime) is bad is not sufficient to meet that burden. Many (and I suspect most) plea bargains regard how many years of incarceration the prosecutor will pursue, not which charge of crime will be pursued. And even if this weren’t true, PRO has failed to establish why pleading guilty to a lesser crime is independently bad if it leads to a result that he concedes is a just one (lesser punishment for those who deserve it). PRO has also failed to adequately address the B sub-point of my point here where I argued that “If a criminal committed a crime and is willing to confess to it if given a reasonable sentence, forcing a trial on him would give him a chance at going free when he didn't deserve it, which provides no justice at all.” Against this, PRO merely asserts that “Trials are much more fair,” which is both irrelevant and false. While trials may be more accurate, this is unimportant to plea bargaining being just, since the criminal always retains the option to go to trial. This means allowing for plea bargaining will never disadvantage the defendant since he can forego the plea and be in the same position that he would have been otherwise. However, what denying plea bargaining does do is force trials upon people who would have otherwise been willing to plead guilty to a lesser sentence, which is far worse since it runs the risk of letting people back out onto the streets with no repercussions whatsoever. On my 3rd point (pleas in exchange for testimony), You can tell this point is a good one because it has completely stumped PRO. He makes no substantive response to my argument that “plea bargaining can be used in exchange for testimony, which allows for other criminals to be captured and tried more effectively.” In response, he tries to escape this by arguing that it is not important how many people we catch, but solely how long we imprison them for, asserting (with no discernable warrant) that “in our justice system we must value quality over quantity.” My 4 responses: -First, this isn’t an argument at all, just an unsubstantiated assertion of PRO’s. -Second, if anything, the government should be concerned with quantity over quality (a) because the exact “quality” of the punishment is arbitrary and can’t be determined, and (b) because leaving a criminal fully unrepremanded is clearly a worse violation of justice than having two criminals punished slightly less than deserved. -Third, even if the sentence for the criminal is reduced, the overall net amount of “systematic justice” is greater in a world with plea bargaining since two (or more) criminals are being punished instead of one. -Fourth, there is no reduction in quality. Even if the one defendant pleads to a lesser sentence, that plea allows law enforcement to bring the full weight of the law down on the other criminals whom the testimony has helped apprehend. In this way, we still see at least one criminal punished to the fullest extent possible. Now onto PRO’s Case… His Contention 1 of Procedural Protocol has a few gaping holes that have been left un-patched, and in light of these holes, this contention hardly holds water. While PRO does go on for a bit in his last speech about how “The fathers of our nation established our courts for a reason,” he has not warranted any of these claims nor has he dealt with my multiple responses to them, which were: 1st, the defendant always retains the option to go to trial. This means that plea bargaining, far from denying the defendant rights, provides him with an additional right to escape trial by pleading guilty. This is the distinction between rights and duties that I touched on last round. While a defendant has a right to trial by jury, he has no duty to exercise that right. Thus, it is not a violation of his rights to allow him, of his own volition, to waive his right to trial. 2nd, plea bargaining actively contributes to the sorts of procedural protocol that PRO desires. When funding is low, the costly legal hoops that due process checks force law enforcement to jump through are likely to be the first corners to be cut. The money plea bargaining saves can be put towards more and better legal counsel, trial competency exams, more judges to devote more time to each case, and many other ways to increase the over all fairness of proceedings. 3rd, my point 2B applies here. I’ve argued that, not only is forcing a trial upon defendants unnecessary, but it can also be counter-productive because it can result in false innocent verdicts that could have otherwise been resolved with a plea bargain. On PRO’s Contention 2 He does respond to 1 of the 4 arguments in an attempt to rebut my claim that the lesser punishment is deserved (and my rejoinder can be found on sub-point B of my 2nd point), but he has left my other 3 arguments unchallenged: -That using plea bargaining to gain important testimony allows us to convict more criminals, carrying justice to a fuller potential; -That PRO’s assertions that justice has not been achieved are unverifiable, since the exact amount of deserved punishment is arbitrary and impossible to determine; and, -That PRO’s argument is suspect anyway as it relies on a single example to prove a “systematic” principle. On Contention 3 While he does make the important point that “a prosecutor will always have the unfair advantage of better speaking skills” (because, you know, most defense lawyers have a s-s-st-stutter), he fails to apply that to any of my 4 arguments against his contention, which were: 1st, plea bargaining will never result in an injustice done by the state to the offender because the offender agrees to plead guilty of his own free will and retains the option if he chooses to bring the case to trial. 2nd, the problem with false convictions is not one unique to plea bargaining. Juries can falsely convict, too. Pleading at least does something tp help that. 3rd, his “Alford pleas” likely represent very unlikely outliers as it is hard to believe that someone would plead guilty to a crime they didn’t commit when they appear to have a reasonable chance with the jury (nor would their defense lawyer counsel them to). 4th, any false convictions are counterbalanced and outweighed by the many false innocents that jury trials turn up.