>A good reason not to take a case to trial is your knowledge that you'll be destroyed at trial.

Another good reason not to take a case to trial is potentially spending years in pre-trial detention, destroying your life -- losing your house, your kids, your job and anything else that requires your presence outside of a detention facility.

Which is why so many cases end up as plea bargains -- get sentenced to "time served" for a lesser offense and then try to pick up the pieces of your shattered life, or fight (assuming you have the money/resources to do so) and potentially never get the chance to pick up those pieces.

So yes, the system is quite coercive.

Let's say for the sake of argument that the DoJ (or state prosecutors) determine (by whatever means) that tptacek has committed criminal acts.

You are arrested, arraigned and bail is either denied or set high enough that you can't afford to pay.

How long could you sit in jail before you lose your job, your house, possibly your spouse and your kids and anything else important to you?

It could be years before a trial. And given that most folks can't afford an unexpected $500 expense, sitting in jail waiting to be tried isn't all that unusual.

Given those circumstances, how long could you sit in jail awaiting trial before your life is a complete shambles? Given the make up of folks here on HN, I'd expect that you may well be able to last longer than most.

High bail and pre-trial detention are absolutely used as cudgels that attempt to force even the innocent to accept plea agreements. Especially when indictments tend to include a lot of overcharging -- another cudgel to force a plea agreement.

Which is why I don't believe that plea agreements should be used at all. But that's a much larger discussion and beyond the scope of this comment.

'In 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT.[13][14] Federal prosecutors, led by Carmen Ortiz, later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[15] carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release.[16] Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison.[17] Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead by suicide in his Brooklyn apartment.[18][19] In 2013, Swartz was inducted posthumously into the Internet Hall of Fame.[20]'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz