This is an opinion column.

An Alabama lawmaker wants to raise the stakes for criminals who dare to ask for a jury trial.

A bill introduced by state Rep. Jim Hill, R-Moody, would allow judges to hammer defendants even harder when they take their chances in court and lose.

Never mind that the data doesn’t back up what Hill is arguing. Never mind that the odds are already stacked in favor of the house, that defendants who face a jury already risk far harsher sentences.

Just consider the case of LaKeith Smith.

Smith was 15 years old when he and several friends set out to rob houses.

No one contests that he committed crimes.

But prosecutors charged him with as many as they could muster, including some crimes that seemed redundant, like theft and burglary.

They also charged him with murder.

They charged him with murder even though it was one of his friends who died.

They charged him with murder even though he didn’t pull the trigger.

They charged him with murder even though it was the police who shot the other teen as he and Smith were fleeing. Smith didn’t know his friend had died until police told him later at the station.

Alabama law allows for participants in a crime to be charged with felony murder if someone dies in the course of that crime, no matter who actually killed the victim. Typically, this might be something like a fatal car wreck when fleeing the scene.

In this instance though, police shot 16-year-old A’Donte Washington as he fled out of another door of the house.

Washington’s parents said they didn’t blame Smith for their son’s death, but prosecutors didn’t seem to care. Even though Smith didn’t hurt anyone, a jury convicted Smith and the trial judge gave him 65 years in prison.

The other two surviving accomplices served only 14 months.

They pleaded guilty, you see.

Smith dared to ask for a trial.

Before trial, Smith had been offered 25 years. Hardly an inducement.

But after the jury found him guilty, a judge gave him a sentence more than twice as long as the deal he’d been offered.

Recently, Smith was resentenced after his lawyers pushed back. This time he got 30 years in prison, meaning he’ll be done when he’s older than I am now — a middle-aged man.

For a burglary. As a teen.

In criminal justice, this is known as the “trial tax.” Prosecutors incentivize defendants to plead guilty in exchange for lighter sentences.

But this dynamic works the other way, too.

If you make the prosecutors prove you did it, you will face a much stiffer sentence if you’re found guilty.

Never mind that jury trials are a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

Invoke that right — make those judges and prosecutors work for their dinner — and it could cost you.

Again, this already happens all the time — but Rep. Hill, who’s also a former judge and chairman of the Alabama House Judiciary Committee, wants to hardcode this penalty into Alabama law and make the stakes higher for defendants.

“We can’t try every case in the criminal justice system,” Hill said when I spoke with him. Again, everyone’s Constitutional right, but it costs money and costs prosecutors and judges time so …HB 38 would allow judges to “deviate from the presumptive sentencing standards if a defendant is convicted of an offense after requesting a jury trial.”

Hill says he thinks too many defendants are opting to go to trial and that the sentencing guidelines don’t do enough to incentivize defendants to take plea bargains.

“Some people are taking the opinion that we’re just not going to plead because the judge can’t do anything to me except that which is contained within the guidelines, therefore, there is no risk whatsoever to going to trial,” Hill said.

I’d like to tell you that Hill is full of it, but I don’t have to.

Data from the Alabama Administrative Office of Courts does that for me.

Each year the AOC publishes an annual report which includes the number of criminal cases and what percentage of those cases went to trial.

In 2001, about 2.1 percent of criminal cases went to trial.

If that doesn’t seem like a lot, just wait.

Over the last two decades, criminal trials have declined steadily.

Since 2016, less than 1 percent of criminal cases went to trial in every year except 2019, when they clocked in at a whopping 1.06 percent.

The cost of jury trials has gone down steadily, too. In 1999, Alabama courts spent $2.3 million on jury trials. In 2019, the last year before the pandemic disrupts the data, that number had fallen to $1.3 million.

Over the last 20 years, the number of criminal cases the courts deal with each year has remained roughly the same — between 65,000 and 70,000 cases each year.

But jury trials have dropped by half.

When Hill says the system is being overrun with defendants demanding jury trials, there’s no data to support that. Somebody — Hill or whoever’s pushing this bill on Hill — is just making that up.

According to the AOC data, St. Clair County — where Hill lives and where he served as a circuit judge before joining the Alabama Legislature — recently went four years straight without a single criminal jury trial.

In that same period, from 2017 through 2020, the courts there disposed of 4,274 criminal cases.

Plea bargains seem to be doing just fine.

Whether it’s politically popular or not, a plea bargain is supposed to be a bargain: If you take this offer, the state saves money and you serve less time. Hill’s bill flips that proposition on its head. It makes the guidelines the starting point and says If you don’t take this deal, you get more time.

For certain, there are many voters in Alabama who would be fine with that — until they have to pay for it.

This bill, if passed, would result in more people spending more time in prison.

More people in prisons that are already at 160 percent capacity.

Alabama already has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.

We have so many people in prison that the state is spending at least $1.6 billion to build two new mega-prisons and the project isn’t expected to solve the overcrowding or end the federal case against Alabama’s woeful prison system.

Meanwhile, few get out. Our state parole board denies early release to 90 percent of the folks who go before it. That board shuffles through denials so quickly, it recently denied parole to a man even though he’d died two weeks before. They hadn’t noticed, which gives you some sense of how much consideration Alabama gives to prisoners.

But by all means, let’s make prison sentences even longer than the law already allows.

Let’s build even more prisons to hold those inmates as long as we can.

And let’s make Alabamians cough up billions more when we can’t find room for them all.

All so a teenager can serve time until he’s an old man for breaking into somebody’s house.

Just remember — the trial tax isn’t something only a defendant pays.

In the end, it’s Alabama taxpayers who will pick up the tab, too.

More columns by Kyle Whitmire

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