Arrayit Corporation (ARYC)

[Alyssa]

These professionals who are non-criminals may well have been scared to death by the prosecutors because their ultimate goal is to NOT bring any case to trial, so who knows what went on during the bargaining process and what sort of horrible scenarios were described to them by the prosecutors if they didn't enter the plea. Both the SEC and DOJ complaints are sloppy and inaccurate, and going to trial will expose it all and show the jury the error of their ways. That can't happen when a plea bargain is reached. Maybe Mark's decision to go to trial will bring the errors and misrepresentations to light.

FYI: "More than 97 percent of federal criminal convictions are obtained through plea bargains, and the states are not far behind at 94 percent. Why are people so eager to confess their guilt instead of challenging the government to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to the satisfaction of a unanimous jury?

The answer is simple and stark: They’re being coerced.

Though physical torture remains off limits, American prosecutors are equipped with a fearsome array of tools they can use to extract confessions and discourage people from exercising their right to a jury trial. These tools include charge-stacking (charging more or more serious crimes than the conduct really merits), legislatively-ordered mandatory-minimum sentences, pretrial detention with unaffordable bail, threats to investigate and indict friends or family members, and the so-called trial penalty — what the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers calls the “substantial difference between the sentence offered prior to trial versus the sentence a defendant receives after a trial.”

Of coercive plea bargaining’s many problems, two are particularly concerning.

The first is false convictions. Though it was once believed that a confession in open court — a guilty plea — was proof-positive of a person’s guilt, we now know that simply isn’t true. Indeed, of the more than 300 people definitively exonerated by the Innocence Project using DNA evidence, some 11 percent pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit since 1989. The National Registry of Exonerations puts the total number at 20 percent since 1989. But whatever the precise figure, it is clear that innocent people are routinely coerced into pleading guilty to crimes they did not commit.

The other big problem with coercive plea bargaining is that it helps cover up an untold amount of prosecutorial misconduct. Even in the federal system, where prosecutors are held to a relatively higher standard, there has been a surprising amount of misconduct in the handful of cases that end up going to trial.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution put citizen participation at the very heart of our criminal justice system in the form of jury trials. With coercive plea bargaining, prosecutors have ripped that heart right out of that system and made sure that ordinary citizens have almost nothing to do with the administration of criminal justice in America."

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-because-prosecutors-are-coercing-plea-deals-yes-ncna1034201