This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 1st, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The plea bargain turns the justice system on its head.

And the trend toward plea bargaining has virtually eliminated one of the most important protections of our criminal justice system, the jury trial.

Dan Cannon is author of the new book, Pleading out? We spoke last week.

Cato's Clark Neely and Somal Trevetti of the ACLU and others and I have talked a lot about the jury trial, plea bargaining, about charge stacking, about the degree

to which our criminal justice system has been successful at eliminating the jury trial.

Before we get into a lot of the meat of what pleading out, the title of your book, about what pleading out looks like, how did the founders

of the United States of America understand the jury trial? What was the value of the jury trial. What was what was the value of the jury trial in their eyes?

Yeah, I mean it the value was tremendous, right, you know, as sort of a conduit for, you know, for civic responsibility, right?

And it's a for lack of a better way of saying and you know you've you've got this sort of early sense that

the jury trial was this thing that the you know the king of England was taking away from people

you know we were we were you know keeping people away from you know keeping people off of juries and taking jury trials out of areas where

they needed to be and that you know it's actually part of the original

declaration of independence you've got this you know it's actually part of the original declaration of independence you've got

this you know indictment of the king for taking jury trials away from people and you

know but their understanding of what the jury was and how powerful the jury was supposed to be particularly in New England

was much different than the way that we understand it now

uh... because juries were more powerful that, right?

You know, and that's the interesting thing that I really didn't have a good grasp on until

I started researching for the book, was that, you know, juries now tell us, you know, give us fact findings, they're the fact find right you know so they say well

the the whether or not the car ran the red light you know that's sort of the

...