Why do innocent people end up pleading guilty?

There are many incentives baked into the criminal legal process that stretch credulity, from arrest quotas to some crime labs paid by conviction rather than forensic test. But none is more perverse or counterintuitive than the incentive to self-incriminate. Who would plead guilty to a crime they didn’t commit?

At the Innocence Project, we have come to learn that the false guilty plea, whereby an actually innocent person pleads guilty to a crime they did not commit, is much more commonplace than most people realize. Of the more than 3,000 exonerations of innocent people that have been revealed since 1989, a full 26% pled guilty; of the 319 people in New York who have been exonerated of crimes they did not commit, 23 of them pled guilty.

In a criminal legal system where the vast majority of people accused of crimes forego their constitutional right to a trial and plead guilty instead, we should be interrogating whether those decisions are actually voluntary and truly free as the Constitution and ethics require. And given the number of false guilty pleas that have been conclusively established through highly reliable means, including DNA testing, we know that not all guilty pleas are truly voluntary and that at least some — and perhaps many — are the product of coercion which results from a profound and routine imbalance between prosecutors and people accused of crimes.

This imbalance is exacerbated by the racial disparity embedded in the criminal legal system. In state after state, including New York, where 20 of the 23 people who pled guilty — yet were innocent — were Black or Brown, it is people of color who overwhelmingly and disproportionately bear the brunt of policies that coerce pleas. This racial disproportionality is unconscionable and undeniable, particularly when 75% of the 30,000 people behind bars in New York are Black or Brown.

Unfortunately, our criminal legal system places such stresses on the innocent defendant that it becomes a perfectly rational choice to plead guilty despite innocence. The presence of extreme sentencing frameworks, such mandatory minimum sentences, are a huge driving force in the decision to self-incriminate, guilty or innocent.

Mandatory minimums are a key feature of what is known as the trial penalty — the significant difference between a lighter sentence offered to a defendant in a plea bargain in advance of a criminal trial versus the tougher sentence a person could face after trial. This is a Hobson’s Choice for anyone charged. An Innocence Project colleague, Rodney Roberts, who was himself wrongfully convicted, poetically described taking a plea despite his innocence as “saving and sabotaging [myself] at the same time.”

As a member of the New York State Task Force to End the Trial Penalty, which sought to both identify the scope of the trial penalty through data analysis and surveys and offer policy solutions to militate against it, the first of 15 recommendations in our published report was the elimination of mandatory minimums. Indeed, a bill that has been introduced in Albany — the Eliminate Mandatory Minimums Act — would allow judges to consider abuse and trauma in its sentencing decisions, as opposed to the status quo requirement that they impose a lengthy prison sentence regardless of individual circumstances.

This legislation would restore sentencing power to judges, as opposed to prosecutors who currently hold that power based on the charges they bring. This provides prosecutors with all of the leverage in plea negotiations — the scarier the charges and the mandatory sentence that accompanies them — the easier it is to seek their self-incrimination in exchange for a reduced sentence.

The coerced plea of the innocent is even more likely when considered in the context of New York’s ecosystem: a human rights crisis on Rikers Island and an ongoing debate relating to bail reform. As policymakers confront ever-increasing pressure grounded in fear-mongering relating to crime policy, they should also consider the disproportionate impact of the trial penalty on the economically disadvantaged. The inability to pay cash bail, and a jail that has seen a record number of deaths, promises to both exacerbate the trial penalty, ensure additional false pleas, and perpetuate economic inequalities.

Given the specter of coercing pleas from the innocent, coupled with the fact that over the past three decades, the proportion of criminal cases that go to trial has steadily declined — with 96% of felony convictions and 99% of misdemeanor convictions resulting from plea agreements versus trials — the presence of mandatory minimums flies in the face of justice. It is time for New York to begin to rectify this harm and pass the Eliminate Mandatory Minimums Act. While trials have largely disappeared, justice should not.