Orwellian Justice: The Trial Penalty Under Fire

Mike Fox

Senior US District Judge John Kane.

Most Americans think of our criminal justice system as being like Law and Order, where all defendants go to trial, and prosecutors must prove their case to a jury. But that’s largely fictional at this point—the shocking reality is that 98.3 percent of all federal convictions (and a similar percentage of state convictions) come from guilty pleas. Perhaps even more disturbing is that this state of affairs is passively accepted by most judges.