Sorry. You shouldn't be able to waive your right to a jury trial. Everyone should go through the trial even when they are dead to rights guilty. The state should have to prove to a jury that they did their job convicting you.
Plea deals become implied threats. Take this cheaper deal or we'll throw this massive set of stuff at you. Remember Aaron Swartz?
If everyone had to go through a jury trial (which I kind of agree that they should), what's your threshold for allowing them to remain out of jail before trial? How much are you willing to give jurors as a stipend for missing work? How much do you want to spend fitting out new courtrooms? Because if all three are not extremely generous by current US standards, you're going to be forcing innocent/kind of guilty people to sit in jail for years waiting for their trials - we don't have nearly enough judges, jury members or court capacity to give everyone the speedy trial with a jury of their peers.
> we don't have nearly enough judges, jury members or court capacity to give everyone the speedy trial with a jury of their peers.
Then perhaps we are arresting far too many people for things that don't matter?
If you remove low-level drug offenders from the system, suddenly there is a LOT more capacity.
Or, mentioning my earlier example, why the hell was a federal prosecutor gung ho to go after Aaron Swartz? Apparently there wasn't anything more important to be spending time on. That doesn't look like a very overloaded court system to me.
If the general public had to actually PAY for the justice system, perhaps they'd suddenly discover that they want it a lot smaller.
