Roughly 10% of those defendants who were later exonerated by DNA evidence through the efforts of the Innocence Project pled guilty to a crime they did not commit. What would lead a person to do that? Hon. Jed S. Rakoff, United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York examines that question in the above-entitled thought-provoking article (found here) in the November 20, 2014 issue of the New York Review of Books. Judge Rakoff, both a prosecutor and a defense attorney before ascending to the bench, examines the institutional pressures that lead innocent people to plead guilty, including the threat of mandatory minimum sentences and the prosecutorial limitation of judicial sentencing discretion via charging (or not charging) offenses that carry such sentences, the imbalance of resources and available information between the prosecution and defense and, in federal court, the prohibition on judges’ involvement in the plea negotiation process. A short and interesting read.
