Under a plea deal that collapsed last July, Hunter Biden would not have spent time behind bars after admitting to illegally purchasing a gun and deliberately failing to pay his income taxes. Now that Biden is forcing the government to prove its allegations in court, he faces a prison sentence of up to 42 years.
The stark contrast between the sentence that special counsel David Weiss deemed appropriate in July and the sentence Biden could receive after going to trial reinforces Republican complaints that the president’s son initially benefited from political favoritism. But it also illustrates the enormous power prosecutors wield to extract guilty pleas, which is so disheartening that the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial has become more theoretical than real.
In June, Weiss announced that Biden would plead guilty to two felonies related to his 2017 and 2018 taxes. In return, prosecutors would recommend probation and drop the gun crime charge after Biden successfully completes a two-year pretrial program.
That deal fell apart after a federal judge questioned some of its provisions, including an ambiguous promise of immunity from future prosecution. It was replaced by two indictments that multiplied the charges against Biden.
Biden, who admitted he was a crack cocaine user when he bought a revolver at a gun shop in Wilmington, Delaware, in 2018, was initially charged with violating a statute that makes it a misdemeanor for “an unlawful user” of ” any controlled substance’. “receiving or possessing a firearm.” A September 14 indictment added two more felonies based on the same transaction, both of which Biden allegedly committed by falsely denying illegal drug use when he purchased the gun.
In addition to the two original tax bills, a Dec. 7 indictment includes four misdemeanor counts of late filing or late payment and three misdemeanors: one count of tax evasion and two counts of filing a false return. The crimes are all related to Biden’s 2018 taxes, which also formed the basis for one of the original felony charges.
In short, Weiss hasn’t so much uncovered new crimes as he has uncovered behavior he was aware of when he supported the deal that would have allowed Biden to avoid prison time. And Weiss only did that because Biden decided he would exercise his constitutional right to trial.
If Biden is convicted, his sentences could be significantly shorter than the statutory maximums. Nevertheless, he could face a stiff penalty for refusing to plead guilty, which could include several years behind bars.
Biden is hardly unusual in that regard. According to a 2018 analysis by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), the average sentence for federal defendants convicted after trial was more than three times as long as the average sentence for defendants who pleaded guilty to similar crimes.
This ‘probationary sentence’ partly explains why, contrary to the impression given by films and TV programmes, criminal cases almost never go to trial. In the United States, nearly 98 percent of criminal convictions result from guilty pleas, meaning the NACDL is not exaggerating when it says the Sixth Amendment right to trial is “on the brink of extinction.”
The pressure to plead guilty is so powerful that it can influence even the innocent. “A study of DNA exonerations conducted by the Innocence Project found that 11% of those exonerated had pleaded guilty,” an American Bar Association task force noted in a 2023 report.
You may have trouble sympathizing with Biden, who made a fortune trading in his father’s name and, according to last week’s indictment, “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle instead of paying his taxes ‘. Nevertheless, his case is an example of the broad prosecutorial discretion that has virtually nullified the venerable safeguard that Thomas Jefferson called “the only anchor ever devised by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its Constitution.” done.
© Copyright 2023 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
