Torture was a great way to extract a confession in the old days. Do you need a confession to flying around on broomsticks? eating unborn babies? having intercourse with the devil? When do you want the confession? No problem!
But today we eschew physical torture. We know (by faith at least) that it results in false confessions, confessions to things that are not true. Do not the thousands of confessions to being witches prove that? Certainly they do.
One more point on witches. The purpose was not so much as to convict the accused but to find fellow witches. Interesting that point. It was very clear in Salem that those who accused others at least lived through the trial of the others and then had a chance for leniency through repentance.
But were those confessing in Salem tortured to get confessions to implicate others? Some few but not most. It was rational self interest in living longer with hope of to the end of their natural life. That is the most human of things to desire.
As with all torture the job of the professional torturer was to prevent the victim from going into fatal shock at the first application. Thus the procedure was to first show and describe the implements of torture. It was a procedure of easing them into it.
Now I direct your attention to the procedure of plea bargaining. The first step is to tell the accused the worst possible sentence as a result of the crime. This is the modern variant upon showing the implements of torture. Then to recount what will happen to this person while in prison with anecdotes about homosexual rape and the like. This is the equivalent of the second step of showing people being tortured with the implements.
And then finally the bargain. Confess and the charges will be reduced. Despite the literary renditions of the Joan of Arc story, she was offered a plea bargain of today. That she rejected it is the point of literary note.
And almost every day we hear of plea bargaining being used to get testimony against another. The threat is only a variation upon physical torture, psychological torture if you will. As Joan of Arc was offered life in prison instead of execution so to are people offered life in prison instead of execution or a shorter sentence in return for a confession. That we call that "turning states evidence" makes it no more believable than any other confession under duress.
Therefore I propose the end to plea bargaining, a total prohibition of it on the same grounds as torture is prohibited. I think it is clear that no more honest confessions can be obtained with plea bargaining than were obtained with physical torture. Both offer to alleviate greater suffering in return for a confession. As people were coerced into the confession of the impossibility of witchcraft by such methods gives no credence to plea bargaining whatsoever.
That people would confess to the impossible does not lend credence to forced confessions of the possible. But then comes the question of force. Is lead in the ear serious force? In our day, yes. In the day without antibiotics, it was probably not much worse than a common infection and certainly less than a mastoid. Tell a woman (witch) her breast will be ripped off with hot tongs and then you have to remind her that is what her mother felt as breast cancer killed her. Perspectives change.
There is nothing that can justify the plea bargaining given what we know of the kind of confessions threats can illicit. Every plea bargain is as suspect as every threat or application of torture.
More subtlety the implication of extention of life if others are implicated by testimony which one must life long enough to give is one that has to be recognized. But this can only exist if testimony rather than physical evidence is the criteria.
Every conviction must depend solely upon the physical evidence. No conviction can be the result of testimony only with plea bargain, any more than one based upon torture, can be considered honest. It is time we came out of the Twilight Ages and realize what we are doing.