On Tue, 20 Mar 2018 00:40:02 +0000 (UTC) jim bell wrote: (I forgot to send this reply sooner)
There is such a thing as the "Speedy Trial Act", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedy_Trial_Act However, it has as many holes as a piece of Swiss cheese.
not surprising I guess. A quick look at that page makes my head hurt.
However, the Feds have a limited capacity to house pre-trial prisoners,
So that may be a good excuse for them to build more jails.
a limited number of prosecutors, courtrooms, judges, investigators, etc. Currently they are putting on about 77,000 new defendants each year, probably convicting 76,000 of them, yet only having about 2,500 trials each year.
increasing the number of judges and other associated criminal parasites may be harder, for bureaucratic reasons I'd guess, so that may be a bottleneck for the system. still your idea seems to depend on two assumptions 1) people would be let off if the state can't judge them (dubious I'd say) 2) enough people will demand a trial. And why? Because you offer them $3000? So, they don't plead 'guilty', they get a trial and they get 3 times the sentence? That is still a big risk. Getting $3000 inflated dollars doesn't cover that risk at all it seems. your idea can only work IF enough people don't plead guilty AND the state doesn't just keep them in jail waiting for a trial. I don't think the part about getting enough people to cooperate can be solved by offering them $3000.
In other words, about 30 convictions for each actual trial. I am hopeful to drop this to maybe 1.5 to 2 convictions for each actual trial. I don't believe that the Feds will be able to put on more than about 5,000 trials, given their limited capacity. Give virtually every defendant a powerful motivation to demand a jury trial, and I think the large majority of them will do so. There would still be plea agreements, but they will be on a far better basis, for the defendants, than before. Jim Bell