NAL, but the estimates are anywhere from 90% to 97% result in plea agreements.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics
(2005), in 2003 there were 75,573 cases
disposed of in federal district court by trial or
plea. Of these, about 95 percent were
disposed of by a guilty plea (Pastore and
Maguire, 2003). While there are no exact
estimates of the proportion of cases that are
resolved through plea bargaining, scholars
estimate that about 90 to 95 percent of both
federal and state court cases are resolved
through this process (Bureau of Justice
Statistics, 2005; Flanagan and Maguire,
1990). https://bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh186/files/media/document/PleaBargainingResearchSummary.pdf
I don’t think it’s so much that prosecutors ramp up charges if they go to trial, as that prosecutors tend to not pursue certain charges or to lower the charges/penalites if the defendant agrees to plead guilty.
That’s definitely been my personal experience. (Not as a defendant, if anyone was wondering.)
Oh I don’t know and I don’t care. I just think it’s a little amusing to get mad at someone for doing something annoying when you yourself have done that same annoying thing several times recently, and then it’s absolutely hilarious to do that exact annoying thing a mere minutes after you have complained about it. Of course, your sense of humor may vary.
I think it is thought prisoners who have sat in jail for years waiting for trial will jump at a plea to get out of jail or move to a penitentiary, where they can at least go outside.
My mistake, I thought you wrote the last paragraph that contains the words “original poster” (below), but now I see that you did in fact put quotes around it and I missed that detail. Thanks for clearing that up.
To me, the relevant part is not the type of gun compared to what was actually used that day.
The relevant part is that she was posting on Facebook about owning guns in the days leading up to the altercation. How might that have affected the perception of the other parties about whether their lives were in danger as a result?
The unverified details about what kind of guns, the location of the guns, the ammunition for the guns, etc., etc., might be secondary to the fact that in the middle of a very volatile situation, when there was already a lot of conflict and multiple 911 calls, somebody in the mix talking about having guns may have contributed to ramping up the pressure cooker aspect of the whole situation.
Whether or not it makes any difference in a court of law, it may be a part of the puzzle to understand how the whole thing went south in such a hurry.
IM told us 4 I think. The first two police officers and I forgot the other two. He might have been cajoled into more but then it veered off back down the rabbit trail to the rabbit hole through the looking glass of did the first police officer do a bad job by making sure LK didn’t die as opposed to securing RG after he secured the unsearched MB who still had a fully loaded additional clip in his pocket. (I’m not going to argue with the success of no one died and it was just him.)
As a former 9-1-1 dispatcher, the cop did do a poor job. At the very least, he should have had LK and MB in line of site until backup arrived. It doesn’t sound like that happened. I have no idea what NJ LEO policy is, but I highly doubt you let any participants out of your sight at the scene of a shooting in their SOP.
The vast majority of criminal convictions are the result of guilty pleas. What’s nebulous is the situation where, at trial, someone is convicted of the higher charge they could have bargained down from.
In a lot of states, there’s pretty much “pro forma” plea agreements - defendant is charged with X, standard offer is Y with sentence Z years or pretrial intervention or whatever it might be. Thus, there’s some equality in the sense that most defendants are offered the same thing.
For example, if a prosecutor is willng to accept a 5 year sentence on a plea, why have a trial penalty with possible 20 year sentence? (made up example)
Generally, the two convictions aren’t on the same charge. A defendant accused of murder, for example, could accept a plea deal on first degree aggravated manslaughter, which has a different sentencing/parole minimums.
It’s really rare that someone would get a really reduced sentence for pleading guilty to a 1st degree felony. It does happen, but I would call that exceedingly rare. There’s actually 3 forms of plea bargaining - charge bargaining (can also be count bargaining), sentence bargaining, and the rarer fact bargaining, where the facts of the case influence the sentence so the agreement requires stipulation from the prosecution about the facts of the case. But in any case, the plea in nearly 100% of cases is for a lower number of counts, a lower charge, or both, so the appropriate sentence is less.
Schellhorn told the judge he expected no more than 10 witnesses plus his expert. Bilinkas said 15 plus his experts. It is logical to determine who the prosecution witnesses are.