Nothing could be more premeditated than this

Actually yes it could. Premeditated means that the murder was planned. This sounds more like the older guy had anger control issues and flipped.

I was offered a choice between rolling the dice with a magistrate, where I'd almost certainly be found guilty of one minor charge and get a conviction on my record (which would prevent me from ever getting a USA work visa, etc...), and at worst go to prison for decades.

Is a magistrate in Australia the same as the UK. Do you have a operation between magistrates court and crown court (with a judge)?
In the UK the maximum sentence a magistrate could give you is 18 months.

touching someone without causing injury

Sounds like common assault. We'd just get a lecture from the police and told not to do it again.

90-95% of cases do not go to trial and instead end in a plea bargain. I suppose you should be aware that if this were not the case then the alternative would be 20X more cases going to trial which would possibly result in people spending long periods in prison because they cannot afford bail and have to now wait behind all the other cases wanting to go to trial.

...That's the good side of (and good reason for) plea bargains. The ugly side are the ridiculous sentences. In the case mentioned, if the man had got 20 years instead of 50 years (or life), that would seem reasonable. But 7 years serving half is absolutely ridiculous, and there had been too many such deals. For instance in another crime program, a 50-50 complicit in first degree murder got just 8 years after plea (probably because she also ratted on her accomplice) while the other went to trial and got life (though she later committed suicide)

I disagree, I think that's atrocious.

I've always been against plea bargains as well as parole, because our justice system is supposed to rely on "everyone gets their chance in front of a jury". We need to hire way more judges, expand the legal system, and give everyone a trial. Most of those cases would be found not guilty, and we'd have way fewer people in our prisons if we did.

Also, I had to take a plea deal in a car accident. There were 2 fire trucks parked with their emergency lights on, and a cop was waving traffic. He waved me on, and as I passed the fire trucks, one pulled out and hit my right-side passenger door. The cop on scene apologized, and I never got a ticket, a week or so later I got a notice that the state was suing me for a hit and run (Even though I got out of the car, spoke with the cop and the fire truck driver, and the cop filed a report saying as much). My lawyer said to take the plea deal because it was only $400 and 2 points on my license for 1 year, at which point it would come off. The risk was I might go to jail on the hit and run, along with several other small charges.

So yes, they're pretty much extortion, and I think these frivolous lawsuits will end when they do.

90-95% of cases do not go to trial and instead end in a plea bargain. I suppose you should be aware that if this were not the case then the alternative would be 20X more cases going to trial which would possibly result in people spending long periods in prison because they cannot afford bail and have to now wait behind all the other cases wanting to go to trial.

The problem with pleading guilty, at least in the U.S., is that you lose the right to appeal. A conviction with a trial would allow for an innocent person to have their conviction overturned. Plea bargains disproportionately target people who cannot afford a good defense. Many of them are truly innocent, but feel they have no other option but to plead guilty. It is perversion of the justice system.

In the case of badly written laws that have excessive mandatory minimum sentences, plea deals can be one way that prosecutors can use some discretion and avoid destroying people. With mandatory minimums, a lot of the discretionary power that a judge might have to make the punishment for a crime fit the severity of the offence is removed.

One terrible example of this, historically, was England's so-called "Bloody Code", which mandated execution for a wide variety of sometimes trifling crimes. For instance, any theft of property valued in excess of a shilling (which amounted to less than a day's wages for an unskilled laborer) was a capital crime. One reaction that you see sometimes is juries of this time period placing absurdly low valuations when they were called to assess the value of stolen/shoplifted goods.

Plea deals can serve a useful purpose, but I agree that they are used in a hugely coercive and unjust way in the U.S. The major problem, to my mind, is that so many people have only a public defender to advise them about the legal system when they're arrested and our public defenders are insanely overworked. It creates a big incentive for the attorney to advise a plea, and even if the client or attorney opts for court the attorney only has so much time and energy they can put into trying the case. There are a lot of structural injustices that work against people who can't afford a private lawyer, and it would help a lot if we funded the public defender system adequately and didn't tolerate nonsense arrests that just waste time and extort the unfortunate.

It's not just the lawyers; trials cost money, if you can get someone to agree to the whole thing without a trial then costs saved. Same with thing jail time, the shorter the period in the less it costs - so if you can avoid a trial and get someone in jail for less time then savings all around \o/

Which is the problem with the 'get more judges!' idea earlier; judges cost money.

If you told everyone 'you taxes are going up by <X> so we can pay for more judges, more trials and more jail time for the underprivilaged' the reply you are likely to get is 'fuck off.' because people won't think it'll benefit them in any way (see continued bitching and moaning about universal health care and trying to control everyone shooting the shit out of each other).

(Well, ok, racists will probably think 'more jail time' is a good idea as it'll keep <group they hate> off the streets, but they wouldn't like the whole 'fair trial' thing so...)

Reading through post now i realise the few crime programmes i watched had caused me to misunderstand the how the US justice system worked.

Even though i still think the man in the OP got away lightly, the general expression in my original post was wrong.

As Promit and others have said the real victims of plea bargains are " innocent or underprivileged people getting forced into confessing and accepting fines or jail time that someone with means would be able to avoid."

Hmm... never too late to learn

Except they're not. It's risk/reward for everyone.

I make a pretty good living, but I still settled with a plea deal. Why? I was risking months in jail, or a couple hundred $ fine (if I took a plea). Why would I pay a private lawyer $5k~ to fight the charge if I can plea for $400?

Cases like this should be thrown out based on merit, but instead they're used as a tax collection mechanism.

It would be good to keep criminals off the streets, but plea deals don't do that, as they would get convicted in a fair trial

It would be good to keep innocent people out of trouble, but plea deals don't do that, as it's more economical to just pay the plea than go to trial

They only serve to rush people through the process and extract more money (either in savings, or from otherwise frivolous charges). If the system was expanded to have enough judges/public defenders, bogus charges would be thrown out, people would get a fair trial, criminals would be locked up for longer. I'd gladly pay more in taxes for that.

Yes, but that comes back to what I was saying; until it happens to someone good luck convincing them of that and as humans pretty much by default operate on a "it won't happen to me" principle most people would greet the idea of the government taking more money off them with a resounding 'fuck off'.

Plea deals in the US are designed to avoid trial. The majority of these cases are where the evidence may not be strong enough to carry a verdict, but the defendant can be coerced into pleading guilty anyway.

Plea deal cannot be hold if the suspect is a danger to society and plea deal will damage the society in general. This did not contain purely the damaged side and the commiting side, but the general society security, omitting the fact that the damaged side is actualy dead and cannot plea deal. The prosecutor of the suspect has failed, as well as the judge with his sentence has failed. Sentences purpose is not punishing the suspect, but in first place doing a service to society to eliminate pathologic and damaging individuals by isolation. Also, the termine "corrected" or "correction facility" is nonsense.