Legal Docket: A plea for fewer plea deals

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 28th day of July, 2025. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST:And I’m Mary Reichard. It’s time for Legal Docket.

Last Wednesday, families of murder victims in Idaho delivered impact statements filled with heartbreak and resolve.

The man who murdered four University of Idaho students sat stone-faced in court as he listened for about two hours.

The students’ names: Madison Mogen , Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, and Kaylee Goncalves—

Here’s Xana Kernodle’s stepfather, Randy Davis:

DAVIS: Oh man, you’re going to hell. I know people believe in other stuff. You’re evil. There’s no place for you in heaven. You took our children.

Cara Northington, Xana’s mother:

NORTHINGTON: Jesus has allowed me to forgive you for murdering my daughter without you even being sorry. You have accepted a deal that will prevent you from receiving the death penalty. Nothing man can do to you can ever compare to the wrath of God.

Kristi Goncalves, Kaylee’s mother:

KRISTI GONCALVES: I live with a constant ache, with birthdays that are now memorials, with holidays that feel hollow, with empty chairs that scream louder than words ever could.

Kaylee’s sister, Alivea:

ALIVEA GONCALVES: I won't stand here and give you what you want. I won't offer you tears. I won't offer you trembling. Disappointments like you thrive on pain, on fear and on the illusion of power, and I won’t feed your beast…..Instead I will call you what you are: sociopath, psychopath, murderer. You aren’t special, or deep. Not mysterious or exceptional. Don’t ever get it twisted again.

BROWN: Victim impact statements are a relatively recent development, a part of the victims' rights movement starting in the 1970s.

Back to this case, families were angry not only at the man himself, but also with the plea deal he got.

Kaylee Gonzalves’ brother Steve at a press conference later:

STEVE GONCALVES: Families are left feeling unheard. Justice is negotiated down through plea deals, and the public is left with unanswered questions.

Sentencing once again fails to reflect the severity of the act, and the emotional fallout has landed again on the shoulders of the victims’ families who have been left out unheard and grieving— not just a horrific loss, but a system that continues to bypass them.

District Court Judge Steven Hippler sentenced the killer to four consecutive life terms without parole.

REICHARD: But beneath all this lies another tension, rooted in how our criminal justice system works.

To unpack this, I turned to Matthew Martens. He’s a trial lawyer, a former prosecutor, a seminary graduate, and author of the book Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal. He says many aspects of our criminal justice system are broken. That includes plea bargaining.

In the Idaho killer’s case, guilt was obvious. A plea deal did save time and money, but those aren’t the elements of true justice.

MARTENS: Plea bargaining operates by either diminishing the seriousness of what somebody has done, letting them plead to something that is less serious, that tells a lie about what the criminal has done, that says it's less serious than it is, or it threatens them with punishment that is more serious than they deserve. That's the only way that you get 97% of people to plead guilty in a country where we twice in the Constitution, guarantee the right to a jury trial. If you're constitutionally guaranteed to a right to a jury trial, we got to get people to give up that right. And the way, or one of the ways that we get people to give up that right is either offering them a punishment that's less than they deserve, or threatening them with a punishment that's greater than they deserve. And in either respect, we should all hate that because it's telling a lie about the wrong that someone's done.

Did you catch what he said? Plea deals are not rare. They are the norm. Most criminal cases are resolved this way.

Martens traces the problem back to another systemic issue: pretrial detention.

MARTENS: Sitting here today, this morning, 500,000 people in America are being held prior to trial, not because they're terrorists or serial killers, which I think we could all could understand in those circumstances why somebody might be held, but something like two thirds of those cases are property offenses, traffic offenses and drug possession….at the same time that we're punishing people before they ever get a chance to prove their guilt or innocence, and all of that is used as leverage to get people to plead because if you've already served three months, six months waiting for your trial, and the prosecutor comes to you and says you can plead guilty time served, you're out today, or you can sit around waiting for another year for your trial. Most sensible people would say, I'm not going to sit around for another year. I'll just take my time and be done. I’ve already served it.

BROWN: Martens points out another flaw: prosecutorial discretion. Something the brother of Kaylee Goncalves talked about earlier. Martens ties that discretion to a deeper breakdown in respect for the law itself.

MARTENS: The reality is that we've made so many things crimes and we have under devoted resources to law enforcement that there's no prosecutorial office in the country that could or would prosecute everything that's a violation of the law. And so the result of that is we become a nation of men and not of laws. That what gets prosecuted is in the discretion of the prosecutor, as opposed to determined by what the law makes a crime.

REICHARD: Martens recounts the story of Clarence Gideon back in the 1960s, convicted without a lawyer representing him. The Supreme Court ruled he had a right to a lawyer on the government’s dime. And when he finally did have representation, his conviction was thrown out. A corrective course was set:

MARTENS: As the court said that absent that right, the right to be heard in your defense, would be meaningless if it did not include the right to be heard by counsel, as the court went on to explain, because in that circumstance, even if you're innocent, you might not know how to establish your innocence in a world where the rules are complex around the introduction of evidence and the conduct of trials.

BROWN: And that, Martens argues, is what a commitment to accuracy looks like. One tool of biblical justice.

MARTENS: The idea of accuracy is about protecting victims. That no one is loved by a system that punishes the wrong person. The person who has been victimized is being lied to, told that their crime has been vindicated when, in fact, the real perpetrator walks free…. And it's also not loving the perpetrator, because we're looking at him or her and saying, it wasn't that bad what you did, and they're not hearing the corrective word that they need to hear…But the point is ultimately to love. It’s not to extract a pound of flesh. It’s to rebuke, to correct the wrongdoer. Ultimately, hopefully with the goal that they will change. Now I’m not naive. I recognize that a lot of people won’t take the correction of the system and won’t change…but our obligation as Christians is to love and to love all our neighbors.

REICHARD: He summarizes the tools of a just system into five “buckets,” so to speak: accuracy, due process, impartiality, proportionality, and accountability. Too much to unpack here…but his book lays out how our current system falls short in all five.

So, what’s the solution? Martens says we need to look back to the vision of the Founders, with what they had in mind when they enshrined the right to a jury trial in both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

BROWN: Martens argues for a return to public trials, decided by impartial jurors, and much fewer backroom negotiations by overwhelmed prosecutors.

Not least, reform also begins with language and the way we speak. He urges Christians to reject dehumanizing rhetoric, even in response to unspeakable crimes.

MARTENS: I think just one example is even how we speak about criminal defendants. Do we call them animals? I know that that's easy to do when we're angry about how a crime is about a horrific crime has been committed, but I believe what we're commanded to do as Christians is to see all people as humans, imagers of God, deserving of our love, and then accurately speak about what that love entails and for the wrong that they've done.

REICHARD: And about the broader debate over “social justice?” Martens rejects progressive ideology, but he does see a biblical obligation to address systemic wrongs.

MARTENS: Our society could organize itself in a way that didn't really punish me for robbing you, and that's what I'm referring to as a social injustice, where we as a society organize how we operate our society in an unjust way. So to take an example, our country doesn't criminalize in most states the murder of unborn children. So someone who participates in an abortion has committed an individual injustice against that unborn child, but our society at writ large has committed a social injustice by organizing ourselves, by defining our laws in a way that doesn't punish that wrong. And so I'm trying to distinguish between wrongs I do one on one with another person or another person does to me, as opposed to the injustices our society does as in the way we organize our laws and the way our laws are enforced.

At the heart of Martens’ proposal to reform our criminal justice system is a simple yet profound question:

Are we telling the truth?

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

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