Jed Rakoff

much smaller than in the United States.

But taking countries like Germany, France, the Scandinavian countries like that, their average sentences are typically about one-third to one-quarter what ours are.

The jury system is pretty much unique these days to the United States and to countries that come out of the Anglo-American system.

So they were former British colonies or things like that.

Most countries don't have a jury system.

I think that's a shame.

The jury system is a terrific system.

The trouble is we've now devised a system where no one ever gets a jury trial because they never get to trial.

But in most countries other than those that were once part of the British Empire, a judge

makes the decision, I think the biggest difference is that judges are much more powerful in many countries than they are in the United States when it comes to the criminal justice system.

There are no mandatory minimums in most of these countries.

There are no career offender statutes in most of these countries.

The judge often plays an investigative role at the outset of the case, something that is completely foreign to the American system.

It would be terrific to do away with all mandatory minimum laws, all career offender laws, but even more so to reduce the penalties involved.

The second thing that should happen is more attention should be paid to why it is that people don't want to go to trial even when they're innocent.

because of wrongful convictions with bad evidence, because of a cynicism about the system, because of feeling that the lawyer's not really representing them.

That is all changeable.

Most of it could be changed with money and greater resources.

A third thing, a more subtle thing, is to moderate the position, the attitudes of prosecutors.

Now, I have another specific proposal we don't think is going to come to be, but in my ideal world, it would happen, which is that every prosecutor would spend six months out of every three years