Guilty Plea: Plea Bargaining

"There is no glory in plea bargaining," writes Professor George Fisher. "In place of a noble clash for truth, plea bargaining gives us a skulking truce . . . . Plea bargaining may be . . . the invading barbarian. But it has won all the same" (p. 859). In the late 1990s, 94 percent of the convictions of state-court felony defendants in the seventy-five largest U.S. counties were by guilty plea rather than trial (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1999, p. iv). Similarly, 94 percent of all federal-court felony convictions were by guilty plea (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000, p. 51). Professor John Langbein, a prominent plea bargaining critic, suggests that Americans replace the word all in the Constitutional declaration, "The Trial of all Crimes . . . shall be by jury," with the words virtually none (Langbein, 1992). Plea bargaining has made our criminal justice system far more administrative than adjudicative in character.