Those Who Administer Justice Should Know The Meaning Of The Word

Attorney General John Ashcroft has ordered federal prosecutors to seek maximum penalties in all cases, and to avoid plea bargains where a defendant is given a lesser charge and lower sentence in exchange for admitting guilt.

Simple economics proves the common sense of how bad an idea this is:

Defendant plea	Chance of avoiding jail	Average sentence before	Average sentence after
Plead Guilty	Zero	Fewer years	Many years
Plead Innocent	Non-zero	Many years	Many years

If the defendant who pleads guilty is punished as harshly as the one who falsely pleads his innocence, then the guilty defendant has no incentive to admit his guilt. Further, since guilty defendants who plead innocence can sometimes escape conviction through a moving argument or lack of evidence, there remains a strong positive incentive for the guilty to plead innocent.

As a mere matter of practicality, the criminal court system will become even more clogged than now if every defendant goes through the motions of a complete trial. More importantly, admitting one's own guilt is the criminal's first step toward rehabilitation and reassimilation as a productive member of society. Spending months arguing one's own innocence when one knows one is guilty could create a mental block which prevents a criminal from making this admission or from acknowledging that his guilt could have caused others harm, thus making the defendant more likely to turn into a career criminal with no sense of duty to society.

The order also seems to assume, falsely, that there are no such things as extenuating circumstances. Though many cases may be similar, no two are exactly alike. A terrible criminal who commits his crime in the most heinous manner and holds the justice system in contempt should be handed a harsher punishment than the fool who stupidly commits a crime and genuinely feels sorry for it, even if the charge on paper is the same. The judge or jury is the final arbiter of sentencing, but the state prosecutor, as a representative of the People, also has a duty to seek truth and fairness.

Ashcroft earlier ordered prosecutors to seek the death penalty in many cases when the prosecutors had decided this was unwarranted, a move that can only be described as bloodlust. More recently, Ashcroft ordered prosecutors to report the names of judges who handed down sentences the prosecutors deemed lenient. This, to say nothing of the Patriot Act and its proposed successor, the several round-ups of honest and law-abiding Moslem immigrants for having been born in the wrong country, the refusal to grant habeas corpus to some prisoners or even bother to charge them with a crime, and many other abominations which John Ashcroft can call his own.

Though head of the Department of Justice, Ashcroft is proving through his actions that he is the enemy of Justice. By Bush's allowing such incompetent barbarity to continue in one of the executive branch's most high-profile departments without rebuke, this implicit approval of Ashcroft's actions reflects on Bush. Those with their eyes open will remember this in 2004.

Posted by Warrior Tang at September 23, 2003 10:31 PM

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