Plea-Bargaining

If every defendant demanded a jury trial, the criminal system would collapse

The Sixth Amendment guarantees a jury trial; the modern American criminal system depends on near-universal non-exercise of that right. The Supreme Court has effectively conceded the dependence: Justice Kennedy in Lafler v. Cooper (2012) — 'criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials,' with 97% of federal convictions and 94% of state convictions by guilty plea (the Court's own figure). The system maintains the plea-dominant equilibrium through structural pressures it itself engineers (the USSG § 3E1.1 acceptance-of-responsibility discount; pretrial detention; charge-stacking). The capacity arithmetic confirms the structural conclusion: a modest plea-rate drop multiplies trial demand against essentially fixed infrastructure with a 70-day Speedy Trial Act constraint that elasticity cannot fully absorb. The form/function asymmetry the project documents under substance-over-form has its most operationally consequential expression here.