>It's meaningless to talk about the disproportionality of the maximum sentence when the law is designed to accommodate offences from the trivial to the truly egregious.

It isn't designed that way for these offenses, that's the problem. Congress is trying to shove too much under a single offense and then relying on the sentencing guidelines and the courts to separate it out. 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.

>You think this allows too much discretion to prosecutors and courts, OK, so did a lot of other people at one point, and that's how we wound up with standardized sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums.

Both of those things are not what I am suggesting. The trouble is that maximum sentences for nonviolent crimes are too high and the serious offenses are defined too broadly. Establishing or raising minimum sentences does nothing to help that, if anything it makes it worse.

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. The more broadly defined an offense is, the lower the penalties should be. Enhancements are the opposite: They take minor offenses and ratchet them up into severe crimes based on broad and not necessarily even relevant ancillary factors.

We rarely if ever see people who get into a bar fight be accused of attempted murder and have 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 not covered. 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.

>You don't lose any of your constitutional rights when you accept a plea bargain.

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.

>The reality is that people take them because they don't expect to win in court. The standard of proof in criminal trials is very high, so defense lawyers have little incentive to accept a plea bargain unless the evidence overwhelmingly points to guilt.

It makes logical sense to accept a plea bargain in cases where its expected value is better than the expected value of a trial. The issue comes when the outcome of a trial is at all uncertain. 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. 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.