THE PLEA IS OUT OF CONTROL

Filmmaker Ofra Bikel, an Israeli woman with a seemingly endless curiosity
about the American legal system, has made another documentary that reminds
us life is not a "Law & Order" episode.

"The Plea" airs as a 90-minute "Frontline" at 9 tonight on PBS. It concerns
the plea bargain, which, according to Bikel, is the way that 95 percent of
court cases are resolved. Not with a court trial; not with dramatic
orations from the prosecutor and defense; but with an agreement, signed by
the defendant, often after much arm-twisting by the prosecutor, the judge
and even the defendant's own lawyer and loved ones.

Using the story of a routine drug bust in Texas, Bikel shows how plea
bargains are used to coerce suspects into paying fines, which fatten the
local government's coffers, and reduce caseloads of overburdened courts,
which keep taxes down.

Problem is, sometimes the defendants aren't guilty, many of them are poor
and they cannot afford decent legal counsel, let alone fines plus court
costs. With her usual talent for finding the most heart-rending stories,
Bikel identifies one falsely accused single mother whose guilty plea
plunges her into destitution.

And then Bikel raises the stakes, turning to the court cases we see on TV
all the time: the ones involving life and death. She tells of cases where
prosecutors used plea bargains to resolve murder cases where the evidence
was shockingly flimsy.

These are the most disturbing cases, because they result in people
admitting to taking the life of another, when in fact they did not.

And yet, as one Yale professor explains to Bikel, given the choice between
jail and the possibility of death row, "any of us will plead guilty."