LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- (WDRB) Two recent high-profile murder cases have put the spotlight on the practice of plea bargaining.
WDRB investigates why accused killers often never go to trial, even against the wishes of the victims' families.
Commonwealth's Attorney Dave Stengel says he does sympathize with those families. But, he says prosecutors judge each case on merit, not emotion.
"There's no closure." That was a mother's raw emotion after the man who killed her son during a drug deal pleads guilty to manslaughter and is sentenced to 20 years.
"It just feels like somebody has stabbed me in the heart once again." Another mother's lament after her child's killer takes a plea bargain and gets 20 years.
"It's crazy when you can get more time for selling dope, robberies than murder."
"It is an emotional thing, said Commonwealth's Attorney Dave Stengel. "You want to reach out. You want to help those people. But sometimes you can't."
Stengel says his office indicts more than 4,000 cases every year. And only two-and-a-half percent actually go to trial. "If we went to trial on everything, it would take 400 years to try them. It's a financial and physical impossibility to do it."
Stengel says prosecutors must strip away all the emotion, analyze the case, and determine what a jury might do. He says several factors come into play. "Self-defense is one of them. Mutual criminal enterprise could be another, where they are both criminals and one ends up getting shot. Those sort of cases, for jury appeal, just dramatically drop them down."
But Stengel does say that today's juries often require higher, sometimes unreasonable, standards of proof. One big reason -- CSI. "Some of the things they do on those crime lab shows is just preposterous. But people watch them and they say, well, I think they can do this. And they can't."
Stengel says the bottom line is this: He works for the entire commonwealth, not just for victims.
The goal, he says, is to make sure defendants get the maximum prison time.
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