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"Which is how most citizens feel, up until they become a victim of crime. Then the "rose-colored glasses" come off, and the attitude does a 180."

Then it does another 180 when you or someone you care about is wrongfully accused of a crime. The notion that it is better that several guilty people go free rather than one innocent person be wrongfully punished is an old principle of justice that has been around a lot longer than this country. It is a principle that was on the minds of the people when this country was founded and when the protections were built in the Constitution to protect the rights of the accused.

It's a tough principle to swallow when we are talking about people like murderers and child molesters, but we have to do it. And there are benefits that come from this besides protecting the innocent from being wrongfully convicted. Think about it, with modern forensic science there have been numerous people found to be innocent of the crimes they were accused of committing and in fact convicted who had sat in prison for many years, sometimes decades, some on death row, for heinous crimes they did not commit. What were the people who really committed the crimes doing while others were in prison paying for their heinous acts? They were probably out there committing more serious crimes. We don't want to convict the wrong people, not just because it is terribly unfair to them and the people they care about but also because when we get the wrong people that means the real criminals are still out there being a threat to you and me.

I'm a criminal defense attorney and I've got a different take on this. Television and other media hurt people wrongfully accused of crimes too. If you think these lawyer/cop shows are reality, you would think we lawyers are only working one case at a time, when in fact a public defender like me might be working hundreds. From watching the news and reading the paper it would be easy to get the false notion in your head that criminals are getting off left and right on technicalities, when in fact that almost never happens. Every time some guy gets off because of some bad search or coerced confession or something conducted by law enforcement, it gets blasted all over the news. What you don't see is that there might have been a hundred motions to suppress evidence filed on other cases before the judge finally granted that one. People could also easily be mislead into thinking that people are being acquitted by juries all the time. Again, this is something that rarely happens. Most of the time juries convict and the story ends up being a few lines in the middle of a newspaper. The big news is when a jury acquits. Then even if it wasn't a high profile case to start with it's liable to make the front page of the paper and even make it on TV.

Do you know what percentage of felony cases actually make it to jury trial? The national average always hovers around 2.5%. Almost all of the rest of them are handled by plea agreement. Nationally, about 95% of all people charged with felonies end up with a conviction for something by the time their case is over. I don't know off the top of my head what the the national average conviction rate for felony jury trials is but I think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% to 90%.

Is everyone who is convicted guilty of what they are accused of doing? Heck no. Look at the results from things like Barry Scheck's Innocence Project. Numerous people convicted of heinous crimes have been exonerated, and they've only looked at the most serious cases so they have probably only touched the tip of the iceberg. Bad eyewitness identification (common), coerced confessions, lying informants trying to get out of trouble, unscrupulous police officers and prosecutors, lynch mob media, and so on have all contributed to this problem.

But also, contrary to what you might think the deck is not stacked in favor of people accused of committing crimes, in reality the opposite is true. They're going against the full force of the government, with its seemingly unlimited war chest, its teams of investigators and trained witnesses who pride themselves in getting convictions in almost every case. Unlike civil trials, we can't send them interrogatories to answer or depose their witnesses so that we can get an idea about what they'll say at trial and guard against them changing their stories. They have databases at their fingertips to instantly pull up information to discredit your witnesses. They have snitches everywhere willing to say whatever is asked of them either for money or to avoid prison on their own charges. They can threaten witnesses with jail who try to come out and say that what the police officer wrote in his report is not what they told him. And where are all these liberal judges who want to let all the criminals off? I've never run across any. Even the card carrying Democrat judges for the most part are prosecutors in black robes who think everyone is guilty and who whenever they can get away with it will bend over backwards to help prosecutors get a conviction.

Innocent or not, most people are terrified of going to trial because they don't think the process is going to be fair. They know most everyone is convicted. They know they'll be going up against people with badges and the built in credibility in the eyes of jurors that comes with the badge. They know that even though there is supposedly a presumption of innocence in our system that most of the jurors who show up for voir dire are going to think they probably did whatever they were accused of doing or they wouldn't be charged. They know it's going to be a roll of the dice and most of them don't want to do it.

There is no doubt in my mind that sometimes people plead guilty to things they didn't do rather than go to trial. A fine and a suspended sentence or even a short stint behind bars is better than the years or even decades they could potentially get if things don't go right at trial. I do pleas for probably dozens of people every year who tell me they are innocent but don't want to go to trial. Most of them are liars who would rather be able to claim they were screwed by the system rather than accept responsibility for their actions, but not all of them. And the truth is, even though we defense attorneys will talk tough and say we aren't afraid of going to trial, we don't want our clients we think might very well be innocent to get hammered by a jury and we are cognizant of the fact that no matter how good of a job we do that could happen even if our clients are innocent. If a client I think is innocent tells me he'll take a plea I might advise against it but I'm not going to try to push him to go to trial unless I'm almost certain we can get an acquittal, and even then I'm not going to push too hard because 1) I might be wrong and he might be guilty, and 2) innocent people sometimes get convicted and if convicted at trial my client will almost certainly get hammered a lot harder than if he took a plea.