There are more violent crimes than can be tried. This is a _hard_ problem. Of the options, simplified a bit:
a) try fewer crimes and let more suspects free
b) try all crimes and forgo the right to a speedy trial
c) increase the funding of the criminal justice system by a factor of 10-100
d) allow prosecutors and defense attorneys to negotiate settlements in easy cases, to avoid wasting court resources, and providing a path for leniency for certain defendants
(d) has flaws, but I'm not surprised our system has opted for it as the least bad solution.
Legal scholars have struggled to find a better approach for decades. Curious to hear your recommendation, really interested in novel approaches to this issue.
The problem is that there are too many arbitrary laws that are applied capriciously by prosecutors who don't care whether people are innocent or guilty, that these same prosecutors don't care whether the due process of law is fact not fiction, and finally that when these prosecutors deliberately subvert the process or threaten people with horrendous consequences unless they sign a plea deal (even when they know the accused is innocent), these people suffer no consequences.
Just to clarify, I didn't mean "violent crime" is the problem, I was talking about limited resources in the justice system. It's the ratio of crimes to trial resources that causes this problem, not the raw number of either alone. Scarcity / imbalance forces a dilemma, a dilemma that's tempting to ignore, because it's a hard problem.
Sometimes hard problems look simple to people who have never worked in the profession. It's like how people who've never written code ask, "Why don't programmers just write software without any bugs / that can't be hacked?"
On the other hand, sometimes an outsider has a fresh perspective that can point out flaws in old habits.
Could be either here, but let me explain why I think it's the former.
I worked in the criminal justice system in a major metro area. Most the people I knew in the profession swapped between defense and prosecution every few years, because they were interested in the process, not in scoring points for one side.
I strongly suspect that's because people who don't have that mixed perspective, the people who are just overzealous to one extreme or the other, they are worse at connecting with judges, who pride themselves on impartiality. Their crusader bias makes them bad at their job, so eventually they get burnt out and leave.
That's not to say there aren't obstacles to fairness in the US justice system. Real problems. There are a ton, some on each side. For example: Public defenders are vastly under-resourced. Prosecutors have resource dilemmas, but defenders are just fucked. Juries have zero sympathy for victims that aren't like them. Jurisdictions that are right next door to each other can approach low level crimes way differently, because of uneven resources, so walking a block can turn a no jail time misdemeanor into a ten year offense. Those with psychological problems or mental disabilities should basically never be put in front of a jury, as either a victim or as a defendant. Also, the mentally ill need solutions that aren't jail, but they're often shoehorned into a system that only makes their situation worse.
Having seen all that on a day to day basis, the problem you described, where prosecutors just love framing innocents because fuck justice? That doesn't line up with my experience at all. I mean, I'm all for safeguards, but there are some other issues too, some of which seemed slightly more common to me.
