In response to a letter you printed in your Jan. 8 issue, written by Haines resident John Orr (“Plea was lie, defendant says”), I am submitting for your publication an excerpt from an article entitled, “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty,” which appeared in the New York Review of Books on Nov. 20, 2014, as follows: “…our criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors and with no judicial oversight. The outcome is very largely determined by the prosecutors alone.”

Elisabetta LoGuidice