Pubdate: Thu, 17 Jun 2004
Source: Kansas City Star (MO)
Copyright: 2004 The Kansas City Star
Contact:  http://www.kcstar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/221
Author: Aaron Barnhart

THE PLEA IS OUT OF CONTROL

Filmmaker Ofra Bikel, an Israeli woman with a seemingly endless curiosity 
about the American legal system, has made another documentary that reminds 
us life is not a "Law & Order" episode.

"The Plea" airs as a 90-minute "Frontline" at 9 tonight on PBS. It concerns 
the plea bargain, which, according to Bikel, is the way that 95 percent of 
court cases are resolved. Not with a court trial; not with dramatic 
orations from the prosecutor and defense; but with an agreement, signed by 
the defendant, often after much arm-twisting by the prosecutor, the judge 
and even the defendant's own lawyer and loved ones.

Using the story of a routine drug bust in Texas, Bikel shows how plea 
bargains are used to coerce suspects into paying fines, which fatten the 
local government's coffers, and reduce caseloads of overburdened courts, 
which keep taxes down.

Problem is, sometimes the defendants aren't guilty, many of them are poor 
and they cannot afford decent legal counsel, let alone fines plus court 
costs. With her usual talent for finding the most heart-rending stories, 
Bikel identifies one falsely accused single mother whose guilty plea 
plunges her into destitution.

And then Bikel raises the stakes, turning to the court cases we see on TV 
all the time: the ones involving life and death. She tells of cases where 
prosecutors used plea bargains to resolve murder cases where the evidence 
was shockingly flimsy.

These are the most disturbing cases, because they result in people 
admitting to taking the life of another, when in fact they did not.

And yet, as one Yale professor explains to Bikel, given the choice between 
jail and the possibility of death row, "any of us will plead guilty."
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MAP posted-by: Beth