Justice Gone Awry

Harvey Yoder has been a resident of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia since 1946 when his family moved from Kansas by train. Harvey is an ordained Mennonite minister and now have a seminary degree and a master's degree in counseling and since 1988 have been a marriage and family counselor and pastor of a local house church. Harvey has spoken here at HUU on a number of occasions. On Sunday, January 23rd, he presented a sermon Justice Gone Awry. The first part is presented below:

A judge I spoke with recently told me that without the use of plea bargaining, where a deal is reached in which a defendant receives a lesser sentence in exchange for a guilty plea, the courts would be hopelessly backed up with more cases than they could handle. When a defendant is actually guilty, I can see such an arrangement saving time and court costs and perhaps living up to its name as a “bargain. But when a defendant is not guilty, should he or she, while under oath to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, feel coerced into giving up their right to due process that might exonerate them, simply because of the risk of receiving a dreadfully long prison sentence?

You can read Justice Gone Awry on Harvey's blog.