What's with all the hate for the US justice system?
Well, there's the absurd 99 year potential sentence and the fact that they want to run 5 different prosecutions in different jurisdictions (i.e. he would be on remand longer than the entire UK sentence).
Also, UK prosecutors are civil servants with zero public profile. They are not there to launch a political career, the public doesn't know or care what their personal conviction rates are (unless they are obviously incompetent) and they can't plea bargain or usurp the Judge with sentencing. Getting cases overturned on appeal or thrown out on grounds of over-zealous prosecutorial misconduct are their primary concerns so they have no incentive to pad charge sheets and play poker, bluffing innocent people into guilty pleas with trumped-up charges and absurd sentencing threats.
A prosecutor with a conviction rate substantially above average (80-84%) would be viewed with some suspicion because he would likely either be cherry picking cases (corruption) or bending the rules of evidence & disclosure (more corruption). In contrast, I have heard that some American prosecutors can have 100% conviction rates and instead of being criminally investigated for their (statistically obvious) perjury and corruption, they are applauded!!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
