Even the Innocent Can Be Coerced Into Pleading Guilty

It’s something you never see on TV: the victims of a police conspiracy pleading guilty to false charges. On TV, the wrongfully accused always proclaim their innocence to a jury. That’s the American way.

Yet consistent with the general pattern of criminal cases in Los Angeles today, most of the defendants whose convictions have recently been overturned because of corruption in the police department’s Rampart Division pleaded guilty.

The Rampart cases reveal a sorry truth about L.A. law: Using entirely lawful threats, the state can make even the innocent plead guilty.

At a recent press conference, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti expressed his concern about this aspect of the Rampart scandal: “It raises the specter, obviously, that they pleaded guilty to something [even though] they were telling their lawyer, ‘I’m not guilty, I’m innocent.’ That raises a question for everyone in the criminal justice system.” Indeed it does.

In Los Angeles, as in virtually every other major American city, most criminal cases are disposed of by guilty or no-contest pleas. Nationwide, only 1 out of every 10 criminal cases goes to trial. Why? Is it that 9 out of 10 defendants fully accept the truth of the state’s allegations? Or is it, to paraphrase “The Godfather,” because the state makes offers that defendants cannot refuse? Consider some of the Rampart cases.

Ruben Rojas pleaded no contest to drug charges that authorities now suspect may have been fabricated by corrupt police officers. Why would he do this? Instead of the 25-years-to-life sentence with which he was threatened had he gone to trial, he received a six-year prison term. Joseph Jones, another Rampart defendant just released from prison, pleaded guilty to charges based on corrupt evidence because he also faced a potential 25-years-to-life sentence under the state’s “three-strikes” law.

Oscar Peralta (aka Jose Perez) pleaded guilty to assault on a police officer in a shooting incident, although he believed that he was framed in the case to cover up improper police conduct. Peralta admitted guilt to win a promised sentence of time served--10 months in county jail--and avoid the life sentence he faced had be been convicted at trial. Under California law, Peralta might have been convicted of felony murder for the fatal shooting by police of an alleged co-felon in the incident. The district attorney’s office has reportedly decided to join Peralta’s effort to overturn his conviction because of new information uncovered in the Rampart inquiry.

And the list goes on. Most, though not all, of the Rampart defendants whose convictions have been overturned pleaded guilty rather than go to trial. We can expect the same pattern to hold for Rampart cases still under investigation.

The Rampart cases mock the bland assurances of the U.S. Supreme Court that innocent defendants will not plead guilty as long as they have lawyers. The fact is that most defense counsel lack the time and resources to independently investigate criminal charges and so must advise defendants based largely on prosecution-supplied information and the attorney’s courtroom experience. When the state’s evidence appears strong and the “trial tax”--the extra penalty that will follow a trial conviction--is high, attorneys know that a guilty plea is the safest strategy.

The Rampart cases reveal the chasm that yawns between the law’s promise of a trial to all defendants and the reality of contemporary justice. What kind of a right is it if its exercise can be penalized with extra prison time? Yet within the broad limits of statutory penalties, current law allows the prosecution to threaten and courts to impose much heavier prison terms for conviction following assertion of the “right” to jury trial.

The potential for serious injustice in plea bargaining has increased in recent years with the advent of a host of new mandatory sentencing laws, most notably three strikes, and the development of various judicially approved doctrines. These range from extending liability beyond the individual’s intentional actions to harms resulting from the acts of co-defendants, or even third parties responding to co-defendants. Fashioned by legislatures and courts with the worst offenders in mind, these penalties and doctrines give the state enormous power to encourage pleas.

Those most likely to give up potentially viable defenses because of plea bargaining are the most typical defendants: people without powerful supporters or money who are presumed guilty because of past criminal records. In a nasty irony, the pressure to plead may be greatest when the prosecution’s case for conviction is weakest, because here the prosecution has greatest incentive to offer a big sentence discount to avoid a trial.

So what should we do? First we need to acknowledge a serious structural problem with contemporary criminal justice. The police misconduct in the Rampart cases may be unusual, but the bargaining tactics used by the state are not.

Next we must consider a range of reforms to diminish the chances of wrongful conviction by plea bargain. If more money for courts and legal personnel will make a major difference in the system’s ability to provide trials, we should find the money. Pleas of poverty from the citizens of one of the wealthiest states in one of the world’s wealthiest nations ring particularly hollow here.

We also must take seriously the potential for abuse that harsh mandatory penalties and extended liability schemes present in the so-called “give and take” of plea negotiation. These rules give prosecutors such influence over sentencing that in some cases they have nearly unilateral authority over case disposition. Whatever happened to separation of powers or checks and balances?

To put the problem in larger perspective, recall the disgust that greeted a recent report on Russian criminal justice abuses. Russian police are said to routinely torture suspects to obtain confessions, inflicting terrible physical and psychic harms and producing regular miscarriages of justice. By contrast, since the late 1960s, U.S. police departments, prodded by judicial decisions such as Miranda vs. Arizona, have largely forsaken the use of physical force in interrogations.

We would like to think our California system of justice is superior to Russia’s, and probably it is. But surely the Rampart cases reveal a serious flaw. For it is hardly a point of pride that in California we only coerce false confessions by lawful means.