Life for COnfessions? The Ridgway Plea Bargain

Life for Confessions?
The Ridgway Plea Bargain
by Kirsten Anderberg

I am no legal analyst. I am just a person examining the local news. But I have a problem with the American criminal justice system's tactics. As I watched the television coverage of the courtroom which held Gary L. Ridgway during his confession and plea bargain this week, I had troubles with the implications of some of the court's questioning of Ridgway. To accept a plea bargain, the court does a little song and dance where it has the defendant say out loud that s/he agrees to waive all rights to an appeal or any revisiting of the issue, that the defendant enters into the plea bargain of free will, and that the defendant understands what s/he just agreed to. I call it a song and dance because many people who fall victim to an underfunded public defender system, and are bullied by threats of inflated criminal charges from the prosecutor, plead guilty to crimes, crimes they never committed, strictly out of fear of getting lost in the justice system, not out of truth and justice. The disproportionate rate of black males incarcerated is a good place to start looking for these "free will" plea bargains gone awry. I also find it interesting that low-income defendants, people who have to accept court-appointed attorneys or public defenders, agree to plea bargains at overwhelming rates, compared to defendants who hire private attorneys. I think it is shameful that prosecutors rely on the plea bargain system in the way they do. I still think all plea bargained guilty pleas are suspect, since none of them are truly made of free will. Virtually all of them are made under duress, under threats by the prosecutor against their freedom and sometimes their lives, how is that free will? No contract that involved money would be allowed to stand under those conditions. Contracts require an arm's length bargaining. Plea bargains are lacking an arm's length bargaining. Aren't human lives as important as business and money in contracts?

The judge in the Ridgway case asked Ridgway if he was entering into this plea bargain of free will. Ridgway said "yes." The judge then asked if anyone had coerced or threatened Ridgway to make him accept the plea bargain, and Ridgway answered "no." Yet I can see that is not completely true. First of all, he was threatened with loss of his life, with the death penalty. HIS LIFE WAS THREATENED by prosecutors, and if he agreed to the plea bargain, his life was not threatened any longer. Additionally, the Green River Task Force admits to interrogating him up to 14 hours a day for months. The Task Force also said that "getting him to confess was hardest of all." And they said it was "a game of psychology and control." So, let me review this. The Green River Task Force is on television saying it interrogated Ridgway up to 14 hours a day, had a really hard time getting him to confess, and played psychological control games on him, and then a judge ACCEPTS him saying he was not coerced into the plea bargained confession? I would say LOGIC argues that he was actually coerced by the Green River Task Force and prosecutors, he was told he would be sentenced to death, most probably, or he could agree to a confession and a plea bargain to save his life. How on earth is that not coersion and threats?

I am not saying that Ridgway is innocent, and I am not saying I have all the remedies for the rotting American criminal justice system. It is sad that one of the most popular tactics prosecutors use to get a guilty plea, a tactic used on a mass scale, is plea bargaining. Plea bargains are inherently borne of coersion and threats. Threats of puffed-up criminal charges, threats of public defenders that are too busy to even speak with frightened defendants before the day of hearings, a scary system that swallows a defendant when s/he is criminally charged, a "game of psychology and control," to use the words of the Green River Task Force, is used whether you committed the crime or not, as a suspect! I doubt Ridgway would have confessed to those crimes if he was not offered a "bargain" where he plead what the prosecutors asked for, and in return, they spared his life. The Green River Murderer was doomed. Getting off with life in prison, not death, was worth any confession, definitely. But, his case is a good example of how meaningless the words recited in courtrooms across the nation are when it comes to free will and plea bargains.

The police themselves said they interrogated Gary Ridgway for up to 14 hours a day for months. What would you do under those conditions? They bragged that it was really hard to wrangle a confession out of him, and that they played games of mind control with him. So how does that mesh with Ridgway's "free will" guilty plea? I understand it is a neat and tidy way to end this, but it is not really an honest, uncohersed confession by any stretch. It is a BARGAINED guilty plea, and I still think this system is flawed, even if it ends up with the desired result. Maybe no one cares about this, since Ridgway killed enough women to warrant no sympathy regarding a fair criminal processing. Maybe what I would consider light torture, 14 hours a day of questioning by cops, does not matter, since it was used on Ridgway, and he deserves anything he gets. So we throw out all the rules in consensus on really bad people? Could you or I be jailed as a suspect, and then be legally questioned for 14 hours a day, for months, in Tacoma, Wa., with cop mind games, getting a confession out of you that was "hard" to get? Did Ridgway have the option of refusing the 14 hours of questioning a day? What precedence does that set? The end result is he is in jail for life, so it is fine. But the process that put him there is flawed, in my opinion, even if it was on a case as heinous as the Green River Murder case.