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Sentencing Stats Show That the Trial Penalty Is Substantially Overstated In the Vast Majority of White Collar Cases

By Frederick P. Hafetz and Mark Allenbaugh
July 31, 2025

Juvenile-Sentence

Jury trials in America have undergone “virtual extinction” as stated by Judge Jed Rakoff. See, Jed. S. Rakoff, “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty,” The New York Review of Books, Nov. 20, 2014. This development is particularly alarming as the Trump administration disregards rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton wrote that if the delegates to the Constitutional Convention agreed on nothing else, they agreed on the guarantee of a jury trial as a check on governmental power. The Federalist No. 83 (1788).

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