This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 5th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

One of the most persistent myths about the plea bargain system is that only guilty people

plead guilty. In fact, given the way prosecutors

are able to stack charges against a defendant, a rational choice for an innocent person

might well be pleading guilty at a vastly reduced charge.

Cato's Clark Neely takes into account a couple of recent examples of what he calls

coercive plea bargaining.

One common claim that you hear from people who don't follow criminal justice, people who are not lawyers, people who do not work at the Cato Institute, and people who are generally unfamiliar with the criminal justice system is that people who are not guilty of crimes do not plead guilty.

Patently false, demonstrably false. Take one example. The Innocence Project is a nonprofit in New York

that uses DNA evidence to exonerate people. It's not perfect but it's pretty close to perfect.

And if you are exonerated with DNA evidence, that means you almost certainly did not do the crime.

They've exonerated more than 350 people since they started and of those 11% led guilty to crimes they did not

commit that is a terrifying statistic and merely the tip of the iceberg the

and the true true answer is,

yes, people plead guilty to things they didn't do,

and the only question is how often does it happen?

So let's talk about Lori Laughlin to begin.

She is somebody who was I won't say caught up because she

appeared to be an instigator in the issues of essentially I don't know what

you'd call it college fraud that is

trying to get your kids into into a school who by all rights shouldn't have gotten in.

...