The Broken State of US White-Collar Criminal Prosecutions

The case of the "NatWest 3" has been all a staple of the UK press all year, but never seems to have got much traction on this side of the pond. In a nutshell, three UK bankers were extradited to the US to face Enron-related charges, despite the fact that the US showed no evidence of any crime. They've now taken a plea bargain, and Martin Wolf is on top form:

To my mind, this system is tantamount to extracting confessions of guilt under a form of psychological torture. That torture consists of the reasonable fear of being found guilty and fear of the length of time one might then serve in prison and of what might happen while one was there. All but exceptionally brave people will confess to almost anything to escape even the possibility of torture. In the same way, the majority of people would surely confess to almost anything to avoid the possibility of spending the rest of their lives in prison. Recognition of the meaninglessness of confessions extracted under threat of torture was the main reason civilised jurisdictions abandoned its use. The same objection applies to pleas of guilty made under the kind of plea bargaining employed in the case of the NatWest three.

If the US legal system receives no respect even in the UK, then it is surely badly broken. I am generally less opposed to harsh sentences for white-collar criminals than most, on the grounds that most white-collar crimes go undetected, most detected white-collar crimes go unprosecuted, and many prosecuted white-collar crimes end in acquittal. Which means that punishments have to be harsh if they're to have any deterrent effect at all. But even I find it impossible to justify the US prosecutors' behavior in the NatWest 3 case.