Recently, I’ve really gotten into Suits. And at the very end of Season 5, [SPOILER ALERT] an important main character is on trial for this elaborate crime that they committed. They’re on tenterhooks while they’re waiting for the jury to deliberate and ultimately decide to take a plea deal with the U.S. attorney prosecuting their case right before the jury announced their decision, only to find out from another character later on that the jury was planning on finding them not guilty.

That entire stretch of episodes really got me thinking about plea deals.

As with any educated discussion, I think it’s important to start with a definition of what plea bargaining actually is. According to Britannica, plea bargaining is “the practice of negotiating an agreement between the prosecution and the defense whereby the defendant pleads guilty to a lesser offense or (in the case of multiple offenses) to one or more of the offenses charged in exchange for more lenient sentencing, recommendations, a specific sentence, or a dismissal of other charges.”

In normal-people speak, the defendant pleads guilty and the prosecutor cuts them some slack.

Plea bargaining is also the mechanism by which about 95% of all criminal convictions are delivered in America, making it instrumental in the function of our justice system.

On the surface, plea deals appear to be mutually beneficial. If you are a defendant that knows that you’re going to be found guilty, then you just have to come forward and admit and you’ll have a much shorter sentence. If you’re a prosecutor – or anyone in the justice system as a whole, this is a great opportunity to efficiently take care of cases and maximize the number of guilty people you put behind bars. A win-win, right?

Not entirely.

I spent the better part of last school year researching mass incarceration for ISM. And one of the biggest factors that, at least I thought, contributed to mass incarceration was plea bargaining.

A little context: the phenomenon of mass incarceration is largely thought to be born of the War on Drugs, which, to put it as concisely as I can, was a period of time in the late 1900s (think 1970s on) in America where a large number of laws were passed to crack down on drug use/sales and promote “law and order” overall.

One of the types of policies passed during this time was mandatory minimum sentencing policies, or laws which – as the name might suggest – require a mandatory minimum sentence, should an individual be found guilty of a certain crime. Naturally, in a period where drug usage was being cracked down on, these mandatory minimums were going to be high, even if the crime wasn’t necessarily that severe.

As a result, plea bargaining quickly became a tool that prosecutors could use to cajole defendants into pleading guilty, even if they weren’t truly guilty or had pretty good odds of being exonerated by the jury, and serving unnecessary jail time because the alternative – the mandatory minimum – was so severe and so life-alteringly scary.

And that’s just one example.

Setting aside the historical implications of plea bargaining, I also want to look at it through a constitutional perspective.

The Constitution – specifically the Bill of Rights – protects a wide array of our rights when it comes to criminal/judicial proceedings, the most notable of which include the right to trial by jury and the right to not self-incriminate.

At least in my eyes, plea bargaining directly conflicts with these rights. Allowing defendants to plead guilty challenges their right to trial by jury and quite literally forces them to incriminate themselves, particularly when faced with life-alteringly severe consequences, like we saw with mandatory minimums.

But plea bargaining also, a lot more overtly, undermines the central ideas of separation of powers and checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution. By allowing prosecutors – unelected individuals who, in no meaningful way, reflect the will of the people – to hold sway over defendants in determining their guilt, the judicial branch not only grows in strength, but it actively suppresses the voice of the people and their power to temper unyielding laws with compassion and empathy.

And finally, there is the question of efficiency.

While proponents of plea bargaining argue that the mechanism (as mentioned earlier) allows for a great majority of cases to be handled efficiently without demanding lawyers, judges, juries, courtrooms, time, and countless other resources, it also puts a whole lot more people in jail (as we saw with mass incarceration) who might not have been in there otherwise, racking up high costs on a bill footed by taxpayers and requiring tremendous numbers of guards, administrators, food, clothes, and more to sustain.

I guess what I’m saying is as convenient and efficient as plea deals might seem, there is very evidently a lot More to the Story on whether they are actually good for us – in terms of justice, in terms of efficiency, in terms of effectiveness, in terms of compassion, and in terms of upholding the core values our Constitution was built upon.

So, maybe it’s time we start demanding our justice system work the way the Framers intended it.