The Trial Penalty
Nineteen people were charged in the same federal conspiracy in Texas.
Milos Vujanic pleaded guilty. He received four years.
Nathan Shafer went to trial and was convicted on the conspiracy count. He received nine.
Matthew Simpson went to trial and was convicted on the same conspiracy count as Shafer, plus obstruction. He received forty years - two consecutive twenty-year terms. He was twenty-six years old.
Read those three numbers again. They come from the same case, the same courthouse, the same judge. The largest single factor separating four years from forty was not what each man did. It was whether he made the government prove it.
This is not an anomaly. It is the design.
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers spent two years studying this and published its findings in 2018. Federal trial sentences run roughly three times higher than plea sentences for the same conduct, and in some cases eight to ten times higher.
The consequence is exactly what you would predict. In 2016, 97.3% of federal defendants pleaded guilty. In 2017, 97.2%. Fewer than three in a hundred exercise the right the Sixth Amendment guarantees them.
A right that 97% of people cannot afford to use is not functioning as a right. It is functioning as a threat.
Judge John Gleeson, who spent seventeen years on the federal bench, wrote the foreword to that report. The people describing this problem are not activists on the outside. They are the people who ran the system.
What it looks like from inside a case
Elizabeth Hernandez was offered a plea that would have carried roughly three years. Taking it required admitting to a conspiracy she says she was never part of. She refused, went to trial, and received twenty years - about seventeen more than the offer she turned down. She is a nurse practitioner with no prior record and five children.
Chris and Erin Mazzei were indicted in 2022 and pleaded not guilty. Trial was set. Each count against them carried a maximum of twenty years. Two years later they pleaded guilty and received thirty-six months and twenty-seven months. Forty years of exposure, resolved at three. That gap is not a discount for honesty. It is the price of the alternative.
Dr. Muhamad Aly Rifai rejected every offer and went to trial. A jury acquitted him unanimously.
Lucky Ott went to trial. The judge granted acquittal before the jury finished deliberating, ruling the government had failed to prove venue - he had been prosecuted in a state he had never entered.
Dr. Raj Bothra was denied bail nine times and held more than three and a half years awaiting trial. A jury then acquitted him and his co-defendants on every charge.
Rifai, Ott and Bothra were right. They were also the exception - three people out of a hundred who took the risk and were vindicated. The system does not reward that. It bills for it. Ott spent everything he owned on the defence that cleared him, and no one gives that back.
The part that should trouble everyone
If the penalty for going to trial is severe enough, some innocent people will plead guilty. That is not a theory.
Of 354 people exonerated by DNA evidence, 11% had pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit. The National Registry of Exonerations has identified 359 exonerees who pleaded guilty.
Those people confessed in open court, under oath, to a judge who asked them whether anyone had coerced them. They said no. They were later proven innocent by physical evidence.
So when a case file records that a defendant admitted guilt, that fact is worth less than it appears. It tells you what the arithmetic was. It does not tell you what happened.
Why this matters for clemency
Some of the forty-three people documented on this site are serving sentences that reflect their conduct.
Others are serving sentences that reflect a decision - the decision to make the government prove its case. Simpson's forty years is not four times worse conduct than Vujanic's four years. Hernandez's twenty years is not seven times worse than the three she was offered.
Clemency exists for exactly this. Not to overturn verdicts, not to second-guess juries, but to correct sentences that are disproportionate to what a person actually did. A president does not have to decide that anyone is innocent to notice that forty years and four years came out of the same courtroom.
What we are asking
Read one case. Follow the links on it - the indictment, the appellate opinion, the government's own press release. Everything on this site points to primary documents, including the ones that are unfavourable to us.
Then look at the sentence, and look at what the co-defendants received.
That comparison is the whole argument. It does not require you to believe anyone here is innocent. It only requires you to accept that in a system where 97% of people plead guilty, the 3% who do not should not be punished for it.
Sources
U.S. Attorney, Northern District of Texas - the Simpson and Shafer convictions
U.S. Department of Justice - Milos Vujanic sentenced to four years
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit - the full sentence breakdown
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, United States v. Elizabeth Hernandez, 31 July 2026