Let’s see... if you go to trial rather than plea-bargaining, especially if you might be found guilty, don’t you risk a higher penalty? Isn’t this essentially what the game theory people call “the prisoner’s dilemma?”
Yes. But, that is one of the reasons we have our such system. Go to trial and face your peers.
It’s the carrot/stick game and mostly stick. The state is out to make a buck off your hide and what includes setting up a system that actuaries have calculated will result in “X” number of failures just to justify through system of revolving doors.
Prison and ticketing are industries and someone gets paid at every level.
Less if the movement were organized. A group funds the defense and gets a critical mass of people willing to go to trial. Carry the test case concept to the level of an organized challenge to the system. Pick a jurisdiction to focus on, and tear it down. Beyond that, provide for the basic needs of defendents and their families. One reason why they banned the flying wedge: it got results.
Yes, the vast majority of these people are arrested for very good reason and accept a deal to reduce the odds of worse punishment with a jury trial.
Criminals all over the country are not going to unite to "crash the justice system". They couldn't care less about the system and only make these deals to save their own hides from a longer spell in jail/prison.
AFAIK, the police use this strategy frequently, to get petty drug dealers to finger their suppliers. Criminals, of course, have their own sanctions against snitching.
The problem with this type of plea (whereby someone else is fingered), is the incentive it provides for false accusations.
The point of the article is that the penalties risked for going to trial are very much out of line with the actual crime. I know a guy who, in his young and stupid days, got busted for drugs. He was offered a plea where he would get probation in exchange for pleading guilty to a felony. Rather than risk ten years, he accepted the plea, and has had to live with a record for over a decade now.
The court system is broken. The only way it limps along is by making sure that 90% of arrested do not go to trial. The end result is that first-time offenders get felony records, and career criminals go through a revolving door for years without jail time.