Thanks for filling me in on the roughness of the world, Andrew. I’d missed that up until now.

Actually, you’ve stumbled, however inadvertently, onto something sensible. My sensitivity aside, the experience of any experienced prosecutor underlines the silliness of your position. In most cases, it is perfectly reasonable to negotiate a disposition — even though defendants are generally shady and often immoral characters, and even though some defense counsel and some prosecutors are unscrupulous. Trials can be ruinous for both sides — they are very expensive for the state and conviction at them can increase the sentence immensely. Both sides have a strong interest in avoiding them if an accommodation acceptable to both can be found.

What you don’t seem to grasp is that what is true most of the time is not true all of the time. There are times when you never negotiate. This is not quantum physics. If you are dealing with a particularly evil defendant, and your job is to take him off the street for as long as possible, there’s nothing to talk about — there is nothing he could offer that you would accept, and if he wants to plead guilty (i.e., surrender), he can do that without negotiations. By offering him negotiations, you plant the seed in his head that maybe you are not as resolved as he may otherwise have thought. That bucks him up, and makes it much more likely you will have to have a drawn-out, ugly trial rather than an unconditional surrender.

Similarly, if he and his counsel are completely untrustworthy, such that it is a waste of time, or worse, to have a conversation, there is, again, no point in talking.

Finally, and relatedly, it makes no sense to negotiate when there is no mutuality of interest. In the case of Iran, we want to avoid war and have a stable Iraq; they, to the contrary, are already at war with us, view a world without the U.S. and Israel as much-sought and achievable goal, and want Iraq to be as unstable as it takes for us to lose and leave. It would be as if I, as the prosecutor, entered a plea negotiation with the aim of resolving the case without trial, while the defense attorney, with no intention of pleading guilty, entered the negotiation just to get insight about my evidence, take my measure as a lawyer, and try to get me to say something that could be exploited for propaganda purposes in the eventual, unavoidable trial. That is a negotiation to which only a foolish prosecutor agrees.