It shouldn't be possible under a well-drafted law to be guilty of a felony without having done something which is sufficiently egregious to justify a felony penalty.

This is kind of tautological. You know that a felony is a crime involving a sentence of more than 1 year, right? It's not reserved for only violent crimes or hardcore criminal offenses, a great many crimes are considered to be felonies. This might seem excessive if you aren't familiar with teh criminal justice system, but it's not that long since we were willing to hang horse thieves and nobody found that idea remarkable.

The trouble is that maximum sentences for nonviolent crimes are too high and are defined too broadly.

Well, how about that CEO in Iowa who robbed $216 million from a pension fund and was sentenced yesterday to 50 years in prison; what do you think an appropriate maximum should be for financial crimes like that? What about the situation where the maximum penalty is not that high, but someone commits multiple offenses?

Likewise the sentencing guidelines. The whole concept of "enhancements" is rubbish. All crimes with felony penalties should be narrow, well-defined and require intentional malice.

Have you ever read the sentencing guidelines or looked at cases where they're argued at appeal? They are very narrowly defined and specific. Go to http://www.sentencing.us/ and look at some examples.

We rarely if ever see people who get into a bar fight being accused of attempted murder and having to rely on the sentencing guidelines to avoid a life sentence, because murder is narrow and well-defined, and things that are slightly similar to murder but not nearly as severe are distinguished and not included. They have their own crimes with correspondingly lower penalties. There is no reason we can't do the same thing with computer crimes, drug crimes, etc.

Has it occurred to you that you might not be very well informed about the law in this area? Because I have read plenty of cases being prosecuted as attempted murder that don't make the news, and likewise both drug laws and the sentencing guidelines are quite a bit more fine-grained than you seem to appreciate.

You have a constitutional right to, among other things, a jury trial. You cannot both accept a plea bargain and exercise that right -- you can't take the plea offer contingent on the jury finding you guilty.

Well, if you don't like the offer, take the trial. The right to a jury is a separate right to that of a trial. Personally I would rather do without the jury part, but that's neither here nor there. The point of a plea bargain is that if you are probably not going to win at trial because the evidence is against you, then by accepting responsibility and saving the state the cost of a trial you are offered a sentence that reflects the reduced burden on the public. It seems to me that you want to have your cake and eat it.

If you think you have a 75% chance that the prosecutor will not be able to prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt -- or that your interpretation of the law will be adopted by the judge -- but the expected penalty if you lose is five or more times higher than the plea bargain, you are statistically better off to take the plea notwithstanding that you are likely to win in court.

AT first blush, but when you figure in the opportunity cost of pleading guilty then it's not that good a deal. The vast majority of people who accept felony plea bargains are actually* guilty rather than innocent people who just want to get it out of the way. The rates are different for misdemeanors where a month in jail or a fine of a few thousand dollars may seem relatively convenient. One of the flaws in your analysis is the assumption that the probability of victory is easily calculable. I don't think you've thought this through, because interpretations of the law are usually wrangled over at appeal while trial courts confine themselves to findings of fact and typically rely on model jury instructions for defining the elements of the crimes in question.

* by actually, I mean they have knowingly committed some action that incurs criminal liability, as opposed to inadvertently incurring it due to lack of notice or somesuch.

Reduce the delta between expected sentences at trial and plea offers and this stops being the case for the accused who have a fair chance at winning while the accused with no chance of winning will still take the plea.

But again, the accused don't really know their chances, and if the prosecution or the judge makes an error they may be able to claim a mistrial or an improper conviction, or if the defense screws up in any way they can claim improper assistance of counsel (very popular this one). Basically the guilty have no incentive to skip the trial because they might get lucky. Right now some guy in Illinois who's supposed to be serving a 60 year murder sentence is being sought by law enforcement because he was sent to court to face some additional drug charge, acquitted on a technicality, and mistakenly released from custody [dit: he's been caught]. If you're actually guilty of a crime and all the evidence is stacked against you, you might as well give the trial a whirl: you have nothing much to lose and fighting your case gives you something to occupy your time with, even if the odds of success are not much better than the lottery.

I mean, how exactly do you expect prosecutors to negotiate guilty pleas if they don't actually have anything to offer? That'd be like haggling with someone who just keeps demanding the same price over and over.