Probation officer sentenced to 1 year in jail for sexually assaulting girl inmates on a "weekly basis"

boing
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This is the sort of thing that really makes me dubious about plea deals. We’ve only recently started something of the sort here in the UK.

I can see the sense of getting people to plead guilty earlier rather than spending time and money on the trial.

I can see the sense of prosecutors making a pragmatic decision to drop some charges if they think they can’t or are unlikely to get a conviction on them.

I don’t understand the point of charging this guy with charges of assault while in a position of authority and with sexual assaults and then allowing him to plead guilty to the assault in a position of authority charges and dropping the sexual assault charges.

The only way I can see that being justified is if you think there’s a real strong risk he might walk on all the charges if you proceed to trial.

Otherwise it’s just incompetence, laziness and/or corruption.

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Plea bargaining is a horrendous insult to justice; it should be forbidden.

They are inevitably used in order to give impunity to the wealthy and connected, and combine with overcharging to extort the working class into unjust punishment.

Even if they do save the courts money, it should not be possible to trade that off against justice. There are better ways to economise state resources.

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Agreed. People often take “No justice, no peace” as a kind of threat. Instead it’s just a statement of cause and effect.

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Yup. If you can’t go to an outside arbitrator for justice, you get generation-spanning vendettas and blood feuds.

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