Unlike other countries, courts in the United States give prosecutors free rein to use threats, bribes, or any other tactics they might like to ensure that a defendant gives up their right to a trial.
The U.S. criminal legal system is terrible by so many metrics: We lock up more people than anywhere else in the world, our penalties tend to be harsher, our arrest rates are many times higher than other democracies, and so on. Plea bargaining is not often at the top of the list when we think of all harm done by the system, but the U.S. is an outlier in this area as well.
What happened in the 1830s and 1840s that drove the plea bargain from taboo to typical? For one thing, the working-class population exploded after the Industrial Revolution. Boston’s population went up by 50 percent in the 1830s alone, due mostly to European immigrants and migrant laborers from other states. These workers, who lived, ate and slept in close quarters, were becoming more and more class-conscious.
By the early 1840s, Boston’s upper crust shifted to subtler methods of using the courts to undermine worker solidarity. First, they took power away from juries. By the end of the 1850s, the Massachusetts legislature had eliminated the jury’s ability to decide issues of law, and the courts were developing long lists of complex rules to limit the evidence jurors could hear.
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