There is a well-known and often repeated axiom in the lives of those criminally charged and awaiting trial. You will often hear this population extol the wonders of what would happen if everybody decided to stop taking plea deals. It is believed that such a practice would shut down the entire court system, yet this “solution” has never been implemented at scale. Why? Because criminal defendants are almost always never in a position to act in their own best interest.
As it currently stands in the United States, almost no one charged with a serious crime goes to trial. That is not by mistake, but rather by design.
Prosecuting authorities have all the power. They get to decide who they will charge and for what offenses. They can charge multiple crimes for a single act and they are equally empowered to offer plea bargains, dangling a portion of the overall penalties as a way out of an impossible situation. This is so common it even has its own terminology — “over charging, up charging, stacking charges.” All of which is just another way of saying that prosecutors systematically exploit the fears of defendants.
The truth is that courtroom trials are incredibly rare, even though depictions of it are popular in U.S. media. In 2023, the American Bar Association Plea Bargain Task Force reported that 98% of all criminal cases are resolved through plea agreements. The stacked deck plows over defendants and forces them to waive their constitutional rights. “Not taking the deal” leaves everyone around you asking, “Are you crazy?” As a result, there is less scrutiny of police and witnesses, allowing government misconduct to go unchecked.
This egregious practice has a particularly destructive impact on Black and Brown communities. It forces Black and Brown people to face extended prison terms as their charges are often more numerous and more severe than their white counterparts. Faced with the awesome power of the state seeking to lock them away for ungodly amounts of time, poor people in particular with few means or resources just take the lesser of evils. They just “take the deal” rather than risk an extended sentence in a prison cell.
In this perverse world, guilt and innocence becomes irrelevant.
Should people everywhere decide not to take plea bargains and instead go to trial, I have little doubt that the criminal justice system would find a new way to restructure itself to neuter this new practice. The right to a speedy trial has been systematically undermined by the Supreme Court, even though that right is enshrined in the 6th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The 4th Amendment has also been carved out in recent decades to prop up a racist and ineffective criminal justice system. Time and again, the justices have contorted language, reason and intellect. Their ultimate goal is not justice, but the preservation of a system that has benefited them and their class for a very long time.
Askari Abdul-Muntaqim is the post-conviction organizer for Pillars of the Community