Mike Fox
Mike Fox

Senior US District Judge John Kane.

Most Americans think of our criminal justice system as being like Law and Order, where all defendants go to trial, and prosecutors must prove their case to a jury. But that’s largely fictional at this point—the shocking reality is that 98.3 percent of all federal convictions (and a similar percentage of state convictions) come from guilty pleas. Perhaps even more disturbing is that this state of affairs is passively accepted by most judges. 
Nonetheless, a few jurists have emerged who believe that judges themselves bear some responsibility for the plea-bargaining outcomes that emerge from their courtrooms. And those judges are beginning to question aspects of our system of plea-driven mass adjudication, perhaps because it closely resembles an assembly line system of justice.
Consider what happened earlier this month in the Colorado courtroom of Senior US District Judge John Kane. The long-serving jurist has earned a reputation for his willingness to scrutinize plea bargains that appear potentially coercive. During what was supposed to be a routine status hearing, Judge Kane informed two defendants and their respective counsel that his sentencing decision was going to be something more than a rubber stamp. More precisely, he explained that the sentence he ultimately hands down would be determined entirely independent of whatever plea bargain (if any) the defendants agreed to. That pledge signaled a significant departure from the typical plea-bargaining process.
Judge Kane then went further: he criticized the provision of the sentencing guidelines that offers a point reduction for “acceptance of responsibility.” He quipped that describing a guilty plea that way was something “only George Orwell would do” and reasoned that applying this reduction would violate his judicial oath. That oath, he said, creates a duty “to determine a just and proper sentence in the circumstances,  » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/orwellian-justice-trial-penalty-under-fire