Plea Bargains

[rat­ings]

A cou­ple of weeks ago I arrived to a court tes­ti­mony appear­ance for a DUI case. When I got there the state’s sci­en­tist was still sit­ting out in front of the court­room, wait­ing to tes­tify. Don’t worry this isn’t a “wait­ing game rant”, actu­ally the amount of time I waited was fine in this case.

The state’s sci­en­tist said “Hey I know you.” And sure enough, we did know each other back from when I work for gov­ern­ment agen­cies. I never worked directly with this par­tic­u­lar sci­en­tist, but we had spo­ken a few times in the past, and knew each other.

He jok­ingly men­tioned there was noth­ing wrong with his analy­sis in this case, and he didn’t know why the case was even going to court. I replied there’s noth­ing overtly wrong with the analy­sis. He chuck­led and said the last few cases he’s been called on to tes­tify in he didn’t have any idea why. The read­ings weren’t close to any kind of legal limit for example.

He offered the sug­ges­tion that when cases like these go, it’s a fail­ure of either the pros­e­cu­tor to offer an accept­able plea bar­gain, or it’s a fail­ure of the defense attor­ney to tell their client to take it.

I said I agree. Then I let him know that there are a few cour­t­houses he prob­a­bly doesn’t fre­quent due to juris­dic­tion, that the “Expect the Max” motto has made it’s way into the court­room. Prosecutors there are offer­ing “max” sen­tenc­ing (time in jail/fines) as the plea bar­gain. Well why would any­one in their right mind accept a plea bar­gain that gives them the max­i­mum penalty they can pos­si­bly get? Better to roll the dice, and hope for the fum­ble as they say.

I said the third option is that the defen­dant just plain won’t take it. For exam­ple, I tes­ti­fied a cou­ple of weeks ear­lier on a case where a con­trolled sub­stance was found in the person’s blood sam­ple. In Arizona that’s pretty much an open and closed case for the state — unless some­thing wrong is found with the analy­sis. The defen­dant was appar­ently very dif­fi­cult, ended up switch­ing court appointed defense attor­neys a few times when they sug­gested they take the plea bar­gain. The bar­gain being a reck­less dri­ving charge, a min­i­mal fine, and maybe a day in jail. The dif­fer­ences being a lot less $$$ in court fines. Usually a plea to reck­less dri­ving is a win-win for both sides. The pros­e­cu­tor doesn’t have to waste time and energy in court (the state loses money on DUI tri­als, they make money when some­one pleads guilty), and the defen­dant doesn’t get a DUI on their record.

Fast for­ward to a few weeks later, I’m called in to tes­tify in another DUI case. The defense attor­ney asked me if I could show up early because the pros­e­cu­tor wanted to talk to me before trial — pretty com­mon stuff. So I showed up early, and saw the pros­e­cu­tor in the hall­way (we knew each other from when I reg­u­larly tes­ti­fied “for him” when I worked for the gov­ern­ment), also we are both big Apple/Mac guys.

Well the pros­e­cu­tor asked why I was there so early. I said it was because the defense attor­ney said he wanted to talk to me. He said ohh, not really — he fig­ured I was going to just talk about the reg­u­lar top­ics that could go wrong with blood DUI analy­sis. I replied “No, actu­ally there IS some­thing wrong with this case, let me show you.”

After about 5 min­utes, bust­ing out the cal­cu­la­tor, per­form­ing analy­sis I doubt many gov­ern­ment sci­en­tists even know how to do, I had shown the pros­e­cu­tor that I was going to tes­tify that based on the prob­lem I detected while review­ing the case mate­r­ial, there was a 1 in 9 chance the read­ing was at or above a 0.080, and a 8 in 9 chance it was in fact below a 0.080.

The pros­e­cu­tor looked up at the defense attor­ney and asked if his client would be inter­ested in a reck­less dri­ving charge. I also explained to the defense attor­ney that get­ting me copies of mate­ri­als to review in advance doesn’t cost any extra, and it can lead to agree­able solu­tions to cases with­out hav­ing to go to trial.

It was very odd to have a reck­less charge offered after a full day of court the day before, but the pros­e­cu­tor knew that I knew my sci­ence. Knew I was some­one who could explain my points to the jury, and knew I wasn’t just mak­ing things up (he did check with the state sci­en­tist who did the analy­sis, but i don’t know the details of that conversation).

So plea bar­gains hap­pen. And they aren’t bad things. If it weren’t for plea bar­gains, the legal sys­tem would come to a screech­ing halt. Courts would be over­loaded, and chaos would ensue.

So next time you get upset, hear­ing about some­one you “knew” was guilty get­ting away with a plea bar­gain, remem­ber you prob­a­bly don’t know all the facts of the case, and when a pros­e­cu­tor offers a deal it’s for a rea­son. Better to “win” a lesser charge, than risk los­ing a greater one. One in the hand ver­sus two in the bush so to speak.