POLS 121 Chapter Notes - Chapter NA: Plea Bargain
12 Nov 2020
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Document Summary
Informal process of negotiation where defendants plead guilty in exchange for sentencing concessions is known as plea bargaining: plea bargaining takes a variety of forms, across courts and among judges in the same court. The last decade has seen efforts to reform or abolish plea bargaining, but these have not proven successful. Cases move through courts at different speeds depending on the court they are filed in. Courts differ in sentencing practices, with comparable defendants facing dissimilar sentences in different courts. This research discusses two potential explanations of plea bargaining and examines those explanations using variation across courts to test the hypothesis. A system in which full scale trials were held for every criminal case would consume vastly more resources. Practitioners engage in plea bargaining because they must negotiate dispositions in order to go through their heavy caseloads sufficiently. Inadequate resources also potentially result in failure of future efforts to eliminate plea bargaining.
