Your idea is already addressed by standard criminal procedure, except for the bizarre part about letting the defense strike off any charge of its choosing.
In a nutshell: after the arraignment but before trial, they have a court hearing (the "preliminary hearing" aka "probable cause hearing", see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preliminary_hearing for a layman's description) in which the prosecution is required to lay out sufficient evidence to justify each charge. They don't have to provide evidence sufficient to prove guilt (yet, because that is the jury's function) but they have to show sufficient evidence that a jury could find guilt. Charges which do not satisfy even this basic level of substantiation are dropped by the court.
Edit: You can downvote this comment all you want; it doesn't change the fact that preliminary hearings have been a basic part of US criminal jurisprudence for decades, functioning more or less exactly as described above.
I'm not sure you grasped the parent comment's point. The idea was that there would be a penalty to include charges that could be struck out at a preliminary hearing.
As it stands, there is incentive to threaten a defendant with onerous charges that would never stand up in court. Most cases are settled by plea bargains. I'm not clear on the statistics, but I think this means they never reach preliminary.
Under the parent's proposal, the prosecution could not introduce spurious charges without risking losing their actual legitimate charges.
I don't know what the unintended consequences would be, but striking off the charges is not a "bizarre" part of the proposal. It's the point of the proposal.
>You can downvote this comment all you want; it doesn't change the fact that preliminary hearings have been a basic part of US criminal jurisprudence for decades, functioning more or less exactly as described above.
Neither does it change the fact that preliminary hearings do NOT solve the problem he describes.
What you describe is clear and straightforward for "traditional" crimes, but when your talking about highly abstract/technical or transactional crimes, I don't think that any non-millionaire could afford representation capable of dealing with multiple counts of honest services fraud, very technical violations of something like a firearms law.
I also think that in the federal space, things like lying to a federal agent should not be crimes -- look at the Martha Stewart case. We should be convicting people of crimes they commit, not for statements made during an investigation.
Do preliminary hearings tend to happen before plea bargains are offered? So if you are faced with 10 charges adding up to 500 years on jail, those have already been vetted by the court as having sufficient evidence and aren't just a scare tactic to get you to waive the trial?
In a nutshell: after the arraignment but before trial, they have a court hearing (the "preliminary hearing" aka "probable cause hearing", see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preliminary_hearing for a layman's description) in which the prosecution is required to lay out sufficient evidence to justify each charge. They don't have to provide evidence sufficient to prove guilt (yet, because that is the jury's function) but they have to show sufficient evidence that a jury could find guilt. Charges which do not satisfy even this basic level of substantiation are dropped by the court.
Edit: You can downvote this comment all you want; it doesn't change the fact that preliminary hearings have been a basic part of US criminal jurisprudence for decades, functioning more or less exactly as described above.