Monday, February 22, 2016

Plea Bargaining

Let’s get back to the Amicus Briefs that I mentioned in a very early post.  The next few posts here on my blog will be excerpts from these briefs, highlighting some of the corruption in the system here in my town:
“Unfortunately, such creative thinking (speaking of teaching cops to be creative in their “work” that was mentioned in a previous post) has resulted in far more than an increase of sexual assault prosecutions. The prosecution's use of the media, creative reporting, and other divisive tactics, while effective in advancing political careers and agendas, has added significantly to an increase of prosecutorial misconduct in the First District Court of Cache County.
The juries are finding these guys guilty? A Research Summary conducted for Bureau of Assistance U.S. Department of Justice, dated January 24, 201 1, revealed three specific findings that reflect the prosecutions in the First District Court of Cache County. l) The overwhelming majority (90 to 95 percent) of cases result in plea bargaining. 2) Prosecutorial discretion in plea bargaining is known to cause discrepancies in sentencing outcomes. 3) Those who go to trial rather than accept a plea are more likely to receive harsher sentences.
Plea bargaining is the primary instrument used in prosecuting cases in the First District Court of Cache County! As such, the Court should take note of the cautionary summary included in the Missouri Law Review Vol. 64 Iss. 2 119991 Art. 2 which states, "We've created a system that appears to work only because defendants accused of [sexual abuse] typically don't fully appreciate the risk of the reluctant complainant because they are represented by either inexperienced attorneys, attorneys who are not very good and therefore are desperate for work, or over worked public defenders. That doesn't sound like much of a criminal "justice " system to me. If the defense attorneys fully appreciate the risk of the reluctant complainant, few would plea bargain [sex abuse] cases, especially single complainant [sexual abuse] cases. But who 's the real loser then? ... Now I worry about [abuse] victims who will come forward, typically as a lone complainant, who will be forced to undergo the trauma of having to testify in court, of having to relive their experience and be subjected to cross-examination, only to have the defendant acquitted - all because the criminal justice system, as currently structured, penalizes defendants who plea bargain [such] cases. Have we created a new class of "silent victims, victims of a criminal justice system that in its righteous rush to convict [molesters/ fails to consider the long term chilling effect its rules have upon a defendant's incentive to plea bargain? Maybe the criminal justice system isn't the right place to deal with the problem... '

More to come…

Please help us fight this corrupt system with the help of our new attorney--Thanks very much!  www.crowdrise.com/igavefirstcanyougive/fundraiser/bauninilson

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