Pleading Out
How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class
-
- $18.99
-
- $18.99
Publisher Description
A blistering critique of America’s assembly-line approach to criminal justice and the shameful practice at its core: the plea bargain
Most Americans believe that the jury trial is the backbone of our criminal justice system. But in fact, the vast majority of cases never make it to trial: almost all criminal convictions are the result of a plea bargain, a deal made entirely out of the public eye.
Law professor and civil rights lawyer Dan Canon argues that plea bargaining may swiftly dispose of cases, but it also fuels an unjust system. This practice produces a massive underclass of people who are restricted from voting, working, and otherwise participating in society. And while innocent people plead guilty to crimes they did not commit in exchange for lesser sentences, the truly guilty can get away with murder.
With heart-wrenching stories, fierce urgency, and an insider’s perspective, Pleading Out exposes the ugly truth about what’s wrong with America’s criminal justice system today—and offers a prescription for meaningful change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Plea bargaining is a "tool for satisfying the insatiable appetite of the prison-industrial complex," according to this well-reasoned polemic. Contending that the U.S. justice system serves the wealthy at the expense of the poor and marginalized, civil rights lawyer Canon traces the rise of plea bargaining to 19th-century Boston, where upper-class Brahmins sought to stifle worker solidarity by bringing labor unions under control of the courts (rather than outlawing them altogether) and simultaneously stripping juries of their "law-finding function." Canon also documents the steady expansion of the criminal code from Prohibition through the war on drugs, contending that the "endless supply of criminal laws"—which require the expediency of plea bargaining to enforce—serves to turn "large swaths of the working class into criminals." He litters the book with examples of miscarriages of justice, including the story of a man who was given a mandatory life sentence under California's "three strikes" law for stealing $150 worth of videotapes, and spotlights those who have advocated against the misuse of plea bargaining, including Alaska attorney general Avrum Gross, who banned the practice in the 1970s. Full of persuasive evidence of how the courts are used by those in power to enforce the status quo, this is a cogent call for change.
