CLEVELAND, Ohio -What if people were routinely allowed to lie in court, and the lies allowed them to stay out of prison or skirt sex offender registration laws?

No doubt, people would be mad.

But what if the same types of lies, also told in court, let a person get out of a speeding ticket, avoid points on their license and a steeper insurance bill?

Would that stir the same anger?

Both scenarios are real. They happen in courtrooms across Ohio every day.

Such deals help prosecutors and defense attorneys avoid risky and time-consuming trials and move cases through the court system.

But sometimes, defendants admit to a crime they didn't commit.

That fact is at the center of a growing statewide legal debate that seeks to answer a question:

Is a lie in court ever OK?

Judge: Backroom deals and lies obscure truth

Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Michael Donnelly has been mounting a crusade to change statewide rules that govern how plea deals work.

Donnelly and other judges, lawyers and ethics experts argue that all plea deals should be made in public - not a backroom -- and truthfully reflect the crime that occurred.

Anything less corrupts the justice system and prevents the community from assessing how dangerous a person could be.

The practice of lying in court about pleas has "become so ingrained people think there isn't a more honest way of doing it," Donnelly said.

"I don't think that's what the public wants," he said. "They want some level of accountability."

According to Donnelly, the choices should be simple: negotiate plea to a charge that reflects the crime committed, go to trial or drop the case.

Changes to the current system were proposed in a July 2014 letter to an Ohio Supreme Court commission that will vote on whether to recommend the new rules to the full court.

If adopted, any negotiated plea in a criminal case would have to be supported by fact and aired in open court.

Continuing to allow so-called baseless pleas "is a threat to the public's confidence in the justice system," Mark Schweikert, a retired Hamilton County judge who serves executive director of the Ohio Judicial Conference, wrote in a letter that supported and outlined suggested amendments to Criminal Rule 11.

(Read the original letter and other submitted opinions on the issue here or in the document viewer below.)

Proposed changes would slow court cases

Those limitations on plea deals are impractical, according to many criminal justice system players, including prosecutors, defense attorneys and some judges.

Strict rules would clog the system, they say.

The changes would, "substantially complicate life for both prosecutors and defense counsel and will contribute little, if anything, to the integrity of the process," Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association Director John Murphy said in an email to an Ohio Supreme Court.

In an interview with The Plain Dealer, Murphy said such a radical change would hamper too many plea deals.

"Without a lot of other work being done ahead of time to make this out-and-out change cold turkey would be a problem," Murphy told The Plain Dealer.

Pleas would be more strictly regulated

Changes to the current rule would not abolish plea deals, which is how the vast majority of court cases are resolved.

But they would require that the facts detailing the crime be stated on the record and closely resemble what a person was accused of doing.

In order to explain the difference, Donnelly uses a farfetched example.

"What if someone indicted on a rape charge pleaded guilty instead to possession of cocaine? It wouldn't make sense, right?" he asked.

Similar arguments are made in a widely circulated 2010 Fordham Law Review article: "Baseless Pleas: A Mockery of Justice" by then-law student Mari Byrne.

Byrne built a case questioning the practice. She used an example of a convicted child rapist who in 2006 faced mandatory prison time in Spokane, Wash. after being charged with a robbery.

After some negotiation, the man was allowed to avoid plead guilty to illegally downloading music. The public defender called the plea deal "a little creative."

A news story called the deal a "legally sanctioned game of courtroom make-believe."

Plea should fit the crime

Donnelly can't point to any local examples like that. But he said negotiating a charge indicted by a grand jury as a sex offense to non-sex crime can signal something is amiss with the case.

"You run the risk of an innocent person pleading guilty to a crime they didn't commit or a potentially dangerous sex offender who the public doesn't know about," Donnelly said.

The judge provided court statistics that show more than 400 felony charges were reduced as a part of plea deals to non-sex crimes from 2008 through 2014. The sex crimes were most often reduced to charges like abduction, felonious assault or child endangerment, which don't carry mandatory sex offender registration or monitoring.

Charges don't fit the crime

No rational legal connection should exist between a rape and crime like an aggravated assault, Donnelly said.

Especially considering Ohio law says an aggravated assault is committed in a moment of passion or fit of rage "which is brought on by serious provocation occasioned by the victim that is reasonably sufficient to incite the person."

"That's a charge most often used for something like a bar fight," Donnelly said.

Used as a plea in a rape case, it basically blames the victim for the crime occurring, he said.

Considering the victim and the big picture

Under Ohio law, prosecutors are supposed to "confer" with victims before agreeing to a negotiated plea deal and judges are supposed to make sure that's happened, Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence Director Katie Hanna said.

But victims' rights need to be strengthened, because there's no enforcement mechanism, she said.

Hanna has heard from victims who have felt out of the loop or disappointed with plea deals, including ones that don't hold offenders accountable by placing them on a sex offender registry. She's also heard from victims want support when they decide for their own well being that they don't want a case to go forward.

"We need to make sure victims aren't an after thought in terms of plea deal," she said.

Having transparent deals that make it clear to the public what crime happened could help employers and the community better gauge their risks and prevent repeat sex offenses, Hanna said.

Keeping the record clear

Donnelly uses the example of 34-year-old Bennie Veasey to highlight how he says some pleas to non-sex offenses can backfire.

In 2012, Veasey was charged with raping a woman he met on a dating chat line. An East Cleveland investigation led to his indictment on rape and kidnapping charges. Five months later, all sex crimes charges and a gun charge against Veasey were dropped and he pleaded guilty to the low-level offenses of attempted abduction and aggravated assault.

Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge John Sutula accepted the plea and put Veasey on probation, including 100 days of electronic monitoring. Despite Sutula's threats to send him to prison, Veasey never complied with house arrest.

Instead, within weeks, he was accused of raping a woman in a Cleveland hotel room and was then arrested in a Maryland human trafficking case. Authorities there said he lured two Ohio women out-of-state, prostituted them out of hotel and was using the proceeds to pay his Cleveland lawyers.

In November 2013, Veasey was sentenced to 20 years in prison on that case. County prosecutors dropped the new rape charges against him after he was sentenced in Maryland.

Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty hadn't yet taken office when the Veasey case was handled in 2012. But a spokesman who inquired about the decision to drop the sex charges said the case became weaker after the indictment and the office did its best to get a conviction.

Sutula said it was "obtuse" of Donnelly to second guess another judge's decision to accept a plea in a case based on the information available at the time. He said Veasey had no previous record of sex crimes and the plea to the offense of abduction, agreed to by the prosecutor's office and a defense attorney, only called for probation.

The law, Sutula said, doesn't deal with absolute truths. For Donnelly profess it should is "naive," he said.

"We are talking about substantial justice," Sutula said. "We're not talking perfect justice."

Donnelly said Sutula and other judges may have good intentions when accepting pleas. But those pleas, if not based in fact, may be convenient but can corrupt the integrity of the adversarial process in ways that have repercussions.

Other examples of 'baseless pleas'

Going for the 'sure bet'

McGinty said in some cases prosecutors have to take the sure bet on a conviction. They do so after considering things like how strong the evidence is, whether a witness has been intimidated or doesn't want to testify and what the chances are a defendant could be found not guilty.

"Prosecutors don't want to be forced to take reckless gambles that might endanger the community's safety," McGinty said.

In cases like Veasey's, a dishonest plea was just as risky because Veasey wasn't treated as a sex offender and continued to prey on women, Donnelly asserted.

Donnelly says there are more honest options: get a plea to a crime actually committed, take the case to trial or drop the charges.

Practical plea decisions

Defense attorneys say some clients - even when they assert their innocence - would rather live with some type of conviction than face an unpredictable jury.

Ian Friedman, who has represented defendants in sex crimes cases in Ohio and across the country, said judges already have the ability to reject pleas if they want.

While well-intended strict rules, like the ones proposed, "fail to recognize what a majority of these cases are, which is a gray area," Friedman said. "They are not all black and white."

Friedman said prosecutors and defense attorneys who have examined both sides of the case are in the best position to determine what a fair resolution might be, Friedman said.

In the majority of cases, he said, it ends up being a plea to a sex offense. If a prosecutor is willing to forgo that, there's likely a good reason or a weakness in the case.

Dennis Terez, the federal public defender for the Northern District of Ohio, said the federal system's plea negotiation process calls for a factual basis for pleas to be attested to under oath so there are probably fewer situations like the ones that Donnelly is concerned about.

The number of federal cases, however, is far fewer than those filed in state court.

Terez said the essence of Donnelly's idea is a good one. But negotiating process needs flexibility, he said.

Because the system isn't set up for "perfect justice" such a rule would likely result in more trials, more police officers sitting in courtrooms as witnesses instead of patrolling the streets.

"There is a reason for the complexity," Terez said. "It's how we achieve rough justice that's fair-er. That is better than no justice at all."

What about those speeding tickets?

Oberlin Municipal Judge Thomas Januzzi understands concerns other municipal judges have about their dockets being slowed.

But he supports the proposed rules.

Januzzi said that for years he has required a factual basis for plea bargains to be in writing or recited in open court. His decision was based on a nagging ethical dilemma of permitting pleas not supported by the facts.

He saw defendants in front of him visibly disturbed or unhappy about entering plea to crimes they asserted they didn't commit.

"We don't want anyone entering a plea to something that they don't think they did," Januzzi said. "That's why we have the court and that's why we have trials."

A speeding ticket should not be dropped to something like a loud muffler charge based on whether a defendant has an attorney or the ability to negotiate to lesser charge.

"My greater concern is that, as a judge, how do you decide who gets that muffler and who doesn't," Januzzi asked.

Januzzi said he was intimidated by predictions of a backlogged docket. But that isn't what happened.

Instead, he's seen fewer cases filed, more cases that couldn't be prosecuted dismissed and those found guilty still being found accountable.

A new perspective

Mari Byrne, the former law student who wrote the paper on baseless pleas in 2010 - the one that caught the attention of Donnelly and other judges across the country - is now an attorney at a New York law firm. Byrne said she hasn't heard of any other states debating proposals to ban so-called baseless pleas. Only in Iowa and New Jersey - two states she highlighted in her study - have courts ruled or set rules against such pleas, she said.

Byrne is currently doing a stint with The Legal Aid Society there representing poor clients.

"I still see it as sort of an ethical dilemma," Byrne said.

But her perspective on the practicality has changed now that she's in the trenches. "I can understand what has to be done for efficiency purposes now, too."