alt Hacker News> If you plead guilty to an offence you shouldn't serve the same amount of time as someone who shows no remorse.
On the contrary, I think that's one of the problems that makes plea bargains so egregious: in order to take a plea bargain, you have to plead guilty, which prevents you from further defending yourself if you didn't actually do what you were accused of. That creates the scenario where an innocent person who is not confident in the system's ability to defend them may find themselves having to plead guilty in order to stave off a much worse penalty.
The same thing applies to parole boards: maintaining innocence typically prevents you from being granted parole.
This is a perverse incentive.
You're conflating "plea bargains exist" with "innocent people are systematically coerced into false confessions."
The vast majority of plea bargains involve people who are, in fact, guilty and are receiving a reduced sentence for saving the court's time and showing contrition. That's not a perverse incentive, it's a reasonable tradeoff that benefits both the defendant and society.
Yes, edge cases exist where innocent people feel pressure to plead. But the existence of edge cases doesn't prove the system is fundamentally unjust, it proves the system is imperfect, which no one disputes.
Regarding parole: maintaining innocence after you've been convicted and exhausted your appeals isn't "defending yourself"; at that point, you've had your defence. The parole board's job is to assess rehabilitation, and refusing to acknowledge your crime is evidence you haven't been rehabilitated. If you genuinely didn't do it, your remedy is post-conviction relief, not parole.
The burden is on those claiming systemic injustice to show that false guilty pleas are the norm rather than the exception. "98% plea bargain rate" doesn't demonstrate that.