You've probably heard the words trial penalty. Let me tell you what it is so that you can understand.

If you're charged with a crime, say that carries a penalty of one to ten years. And if you plead guilty, you'll get one year. But if you plead not guilty and you're found guilty, you'll get ten years 10 times the amount of prison time for the crime of

exercising your right to trial by jury. That's not right. That's inconsistent with the

Constitution. This is Alan Dershowitz and you'll hear why our justice system is broken on the dirtier.

Our criminal justice system is absolutely broken.

By any standard, go back to the Bible even an eye for an eye

a tooth for tooth if you want to go from the Bible to the macato by Gilbert and Sullivan, my object all sublime I shall achieve in time

to let the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime.

In America today, punishments don't fit the crime. They are arbitrary.

From the time I started to practice law 55 years ago, the justice system is added as zero to virtually every punishment.

What used to get one gets ten, what used to get two gets twenty, what used to get

three gets thirty. Our prisons are filled. We have the most crowded prisons of any

Westernized democracy. We have the most people in prison of any Westernized

democracy. We're now beginning to execute people once again and the system is is totally

arbitrary who gets executed depends not on the seriousness of the crime but the

quality of the lawyers, the money,

the racial relationship between the perpetrator and the victim.

Let me just tell you some terrible stories about the criminal justice system in an

effort to try maybe to bring it to the attention of the proper authorities and maybe we can do something about it.

Maybe we can change it.

I've spoken before about the trial penalty.

I mentioned two cases in which people who I helped get commutations for were offered

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