The days of hanging horse thieves were also the days when black people were slaves, women couldn't vote and "witches" were burned at the stake, and nobody at the time found those things remarkable either.

Well no, I think you'll find that those events are rather more spread out over time, for one thing, and that comparing the penalties for specific verifiable acts with systematic but arbitrary discrimination against classes of people doesn't really take your argument anywhere. Stealing a horse is a factual matter which can often be established very easily, and the severe penalty was a rational response to the fact that losing a horse was a often major blow to the victim's livelihood or prospects of survival. This is wholly different to saying someone is inferior because of their ethnicity or gender, or because they have traffic with imaginary beings whose existence cannot be proven.

It should not be the case that "everyone is guilty of something."

But they're not, and people who make the claim that they are tend to cherry-pick their examples. There's a meme that floats around HN to the effect that you could pluck some random person off the street and find enough laws that they're breaking to put them away for years, so we're pretty much living in a police state. This is simply not true.

A substantial part of a fraudulent scheme was committed from outside the United States? [You don't live in the United States, or your "accomplice" doesn't, or you went on vacation with your laptop a couple of times.] The offense otherwise involved sophisticated means? [She's a witch! Burn her!]

Oh FFS. Sophisticated means simply points to the degree of elaboration involved in criminal behavior and thus to degree of intent. It's the same in murder trials; the most severe penalties are given to people who murder by lying-in-wait for a victim or using some method like poison which demonstrates extensive forethought, as opposed to loss of self-control, such as a shooting someone you just had a fight with. These concepts of intent being proportional to criminal culpability are far from new, and they're not vague because they are evaluated in the context of precedent.

Offense involved an intent to obtain personal information? [Almost all computers contain personal information; good luck arguing that it wasn't your "intent" to "obtain" it in any given case.]

It's the prosecution's job to prove intent, and it's very easy to shoot holes in it if it's incidental to the prosecution's main case.

>I have read plenty of cases being prosecuted as attempted murder that don't make the news

It doesn't surprise me that prosecutors would file charges like that, but do these non-murderers actually plead guilty to murder or get convicted of it?

Well, it's kind of hard to get convicted of murder if you are charged with attempted murder, now isn't it? My point is that when you hear of two people being in a bar fight you assume that it wasn't that severe, whereas I find nothing remarkable in the idea that a bar fight can escalate into an attempt on someone's life.

[...] people more likely to be innocent are still offered plea bargains specifically calculated in order to make them take the offer rather than go to trial.

People more likely to be innocent are also more likely to go to trial. Prosecutors don't want to bring cases that they can lose. As with the Aaron Swartz case, and as with virtually every death penalty appeals case, innocense often becomes a proxy for third parties' wishes about how things could be rather than how they actually were.

I don't understand how you can say that risking an order of magnitude higher penalty is "no incentive" -- the numbers speak for themselves. If there is no incentive then why does almost no one go to trial?

You're not following my argument. I'm saying that if we implement your notion of drastically reducing the difference between the offered plea and the sentence a prosecutor will seek at trial, then criminals would have no incentive to avoid the trial. Think about it: if I asked you to plead guilty in return for 10 years, or face the possibility of a ten-year sentence at trial, you'd go trial, wouldn't you?

They should be able to offer a small reduction from what the result is expected be at trial. Offering to cut the penalty more than in half is entirely too coercive; the expected penalty at trial should be less than double what plea offers are currently.

Why a factor of two, based on what? If you are obviously guilty and you don't like the prosecution's offer, you can always reject the plea bargain but plead guilty and make a case in the sentencing phase.

I agree with you that US sentencing in general is too draconian and that prosecutors often abuse their bargaining power. But you're proposing procedural solutions to a problem that is arguably the result of excessive proceduralism, viz. the exhaustive and cumulative nature of sentencing guidelines. You want say you want laws that are very narrowly tailored and specific, and to a large extent that's how things are. We might be better off with more vague laws that left judges more freedom to look at the totality of the circumstances, but some of the time that's going to result in drastic over-sentencing. Procedural specificity is a double-edged sword; if you don't want to see sentences of one day longer than the very specific offenses charges (because that would be unjust) then you have a hard time arguing for sentences that are shorter than the specific offenses indicated by the available evidence.