The fictional lawyer, Perry Mason, was always able to get his clients off because the real perpetrator use to break down on the stand or either in the courtroom and admit guilt. In reality though, most cases are resolved through plea bargaining.
The plea bargain was a prosecutorial tool used only episodically before the 19th century. In America, it can be traced almost to the very emergence of public prosecution — and public prosecution, although not exclusive to the U.S., developed earlier and more broadly here than most places. But because judges, not prosecutors, controlled most sentencing, plea bargaining was limited to those rare cases in which prosecutors could unilaterally dictate a defendant’s sentence.
Not until the crush of civil litigation brought on by the explosion of personal-injury cases in the industrial era did judges begin to appreciate the workload relief plea bargaining promised. In other words, plea bargaining is arguably another outgrowth of late-19th-century industrialization. The following examples illustrates this point:
1633: Galileo gets house arrest from the Inquisition in exchange for his reciting penitential psalms weekly and recanting Copernican heresies.
1931: Al Capone brags about his light sentence for pleading guilty to tax evasion and Prohibition violations. The judge then declares that he isn’t bound by the bargain, and Capone does seven and a half years in Alcatraz.
1969: To avoid execution, James Earl Ray pleads guilty to assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. and gets 99 years.
1973: Spiro Agnew resigns the vice presidency and pleads no contest to the charge of failing to report income; he gets three years’ probation and a $10,000 fine (roughly one-third of the amount at issue).
1990: Facing serious federal charges of insider trading, Michael Milken pleads to lesser charges of securities fraud; soon after, his 10-year sentence is reduced to 2 years.
So does the guilty really pay for their crime?
