not really that interesting, this is a prisoner's dilema which is well studied. because the globally optimal strategy is unstable, the equilibrium state is to defect. She's given no indication of a clever way to shift this equilibrium.
Hypothesis: A relatively small number of relatively well funded defendants could have a huge impact on the system.
EG: Martha Stewart could have done more good if she'd fought her conviction all the way to the supreme court (even if she lost, she wouldn't have gotten more time.)
Thus an organization whose sole purpose is to underwrite (via providing lawyers or funds for outside lawyers) drug defendants who want to fight their charges could shift the equilibrium state.
Maybe only %10 would take this organization up on the offer, but that could be enough to have a big impact. (Again this is a hypothesis).
Thus an organization whose sole purpose is to underwrite (via providing lawyers or funds for outside lawyers) drug defendants who want to fight their charges could shift the equilibrium state.
A jam at the appeals level has little-to-no effect on the capacity of lower-level courts. Appeals courts are designed to sift through the masses of cases they receive to pronounce judgement on the lucky few them deem worth their time. More than 90% of appeals are rejected without explanation.
Also, for the nuke option to work, you would need to overwhelm the ability of the local court system to handle all trials in a timely fashion. In a large county (i.e., any mid-to-major American city), this would require hundreds of simultaneous trials for a period of several months.
I noted above that the nuclear option worked in one county; however that only succeeded because massive budget reductions to the local court system artificially reduced the number of available courts. Without the budget reductions, we would not have had near enough simultaneous cases to successfully nuke.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium#Prisoner.27s_d...