Guilty Plea: Plea Bargaining - Definition And Types Of Bargaining, The Development Of Plea Bargaining, A Comparative Perspective, Operation Of The Plea Bargaining System
"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.
Plea bargaining consists of the exchange of any actual or apparent concession for a plea of
guilty. Nevertheless, the term sometimes is used informally to include discussions about other things. For example, when a prosecutor offers favorable treatment to a defendant in exchange for the defendant's testimony against other suspected offenders, the prosecutor may refer to this offer as ple…
Guilty pleas have been regarded as a sufficient basis for conviction from the earliest days of the common law. In treating a guilty plea as conclusive, common law nations depart from the law of most nations on the European Continent. In serious cases, these nations do not treat any form of confession as an adequate basis for dispensing with trial (although trials are likely to be simpler and to fo…
Plea bargaining is common in England, Canada, and most other nations of the British Commonwealth. As recently as 1979, however, a noted law review article proclaimed that Germany was a "land without plea bargaining" (Langbein, 1979). Not only was the formal plea of guilty unknown in serious cases in Germany, but prosecutors and judges did not promise or negotiate for in-court confess…
As the following remarks may suggest, the day-to-day operation of the plea bargaining system cannot be neatly captured in a simple description: In attending . . . conferences on plea bargaining, I have been struck by the extent to which people who should understand this subject . . . sound like the blind man describing the elephant. One scholar may begin by declaring that plea bargaining usually p…
Prosecutors. In making plea agreements, prosecutors are influenced by a variety of concerns. As mentioned above, one important motivation is the apparent need to induce large numbers of guilty pleas in order to keep criminal case loads within manageable proportions. This administrative concern sometimes leads prosecutors to offer greater concessions in complex cases whose trials are likely to cons…
The statute that created the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 1984 directed it to promulgate policy statements concerning the acceptance or rejection of plea agreements by judges. The legislative history of this statute revealed Congress's concern that plea bargaining could undermine the equality in sentencing it sought to achieve. When the Commission submitted its Sentencing Guidelines to Con…
Prior to the mid-1960s, most courts and scholars tended to ignore plea bargaining, and when discussions of the practice occurred, it usually was critical. The crime commissions of the 1920s, for example, described plea bargaining as a lazy form of prosecution that resulted in undue leniency for offenders. In 1967, however, both the American Bar Association and the President's Commission on …
The claim that plea bargaining is a "practical necessity" derives support from the high percentage of criminal cases resolved by guilty pleas. Nevertheless, plea bargaining opponents sometimes suggest that existing resources could be allocated more effectively by providing less elaborate trials to greater numbers of defendants. They point, for example, to the practices of cities in w…
——. "The Defense Attorney's Role in Plea Bargaining." Yale Law Journal 84 (1975): 1179–1314. ——. "Plea Bargaining and Its History." Columbia Law Review 79 (1979): 1–43. ——. "The Changing Plea Bargaining Debate." California Law Review 69 (1981): 652–730. ——. "Implemen…
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Guilty Plea: Plea Bargaining - Definition And Types Of Bargaining, The Development Of Plea Bargaining, A Comparative Perspective, Operation Of The Plea Bargaining System
almost 8 years ago
Bob your totally crazy and your extremely racist my girl friend knows jesus likes Plea Bargaining
over 8 years ago
plea bargaining is wrong and lets people make a fool of themselves.
User Comments
over 5 years ago
Guilty Plea: Plea Bargaining - Definition And Types Of Bargaining, The Development Of Plea Bargaining, A Comparative Perspective, Operation Of The Plea Bargaining System
almost 8 years ago
Bob your totally crazy and your extremely racist my girl friend knows jesus likes Plea Bargaining
over 8 years ago
plea bargaining is wrong and lets people make a fool of themselves.