Perhaps it should matter to Sides that forensics concluded Bass never pulled up the images and only took them in the absence of the school police officer doing his job. And perhaps it did matter to the government, despite their public statements. Had Hobbs not thrown out the case in accordance with the law, the government had offered Bass a “deal”: Plead guilty to obstructing justice, and the case would go away.

That may sound like a nice bargain. Consider, however, what the implication is: Bass would face up to 12 years in prison and a slew of other life-altering consequences for exercising his Sixth Amendment right to trial after the government made clear with its deal that such a severe punishment was not necessary. That sort of over-charging is common and gives prosecutors leverage to coerce guilty pleas—even from people who aren’t guilty.

It’s a practice some say is unconstitutional. In Maricopa County, Arizona, for instance, defendants are given a plea deal and told in fine print that they will face significantly more time behind bars if they merely want to review the state’s evidence against them or attend a preliminary hearing. One such defendant, Michael Calhoun, was given a nine-year plea deal offer for selling about $20 worth of drugs and told that if he did not accept it outright, he would face a “substantially harsher” fate. He sued in 2021, challenging the legality of that approach.

Bass may relate more with another defendant in Maricopa County, Levonta Barker, who received a plea deal offer for aggravated assault and kidnapping. Barker, too, was told that reviewing the evidence or attending a probable cause hearing would cost him. That’s unfortunate for many reasons, most notably because he was innocent—something the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office was forced to admit after Barker had already spent a month in jail.

With such a wide separation between plea deals and the punishments meted out after trial, defendants have to decide if exercising their constitutional right to a trial by jury is worth the risk. “The plea they’re offering potentially lets me stay as a husband and a dad, and to me those are the biggest priorities in my life,” Bass said. “I basically need to choose: Do I want to clear my name and risk losing my entire life, or do I want to not clear my name but not lose my life?”

Bass will no longer have to make that choice. But whether or not he will ever clear his name is debatable. “The accusation carries such a stigma that people are always going to wonder. So no matter what he does, no matter what court rulings we got, I don’t think he ever recovers from this,” says Faye. “That’s always been the thing that really strikes me about the system is just…how much power and discretion the prosecutor has.”