Plea deals have become inherent to the American criminal justice system, replacing trial processes to a considerable extent. According to Finkelstein and Levin (2020), the percentage of defendants pleading guilty in court has increased from 63% to 89% since 1975. This sticking growth can be attributed to various factors, most notoriously to the so-called “trial penalty.”
While refraining from a time-consuming trial has economic benefits, i.e., freeing limited resources for courts, opting to plead guilty has inevitable repercussions. Pleading guilty is often incentivized by proposing a more lenient sentence instead of an overly harsh one (Schneider & Zottoli, 2019). For example, in U.S. v. Stinn, the defendant refused to plead guilty for a fraud committed by his colleagues, but, although the government admitted that Stinn was unaware of the crime, he was ultimately sentenced to 12 years instead of an initially proposed maximum 5-year sentence. In contrast, the actual perpetrators who plead guilty received no jail time and were recommended for parole (National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, 2018). Such an approach allows for indirect coercion as it pressures a defendant to hastily concede their right to a trial to avoid a disproportionately longer sentence.
The ungrounded choice to accept a plea bargain can also stem from an imbalance of negotiation power. The prosecutor often has informational leverage on the defendant, as they are not obliged to present information to the latter. (National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, 2018). As a result, the defendant and their legal counsel often do not manage to properly assess the prosecutor’s claim due to the plea’s urgency and its disparity with the potential trial sentence.
Overall, though having certain merits, the plea bargaining system poses several ethical problems. The defenders are often presented with a dilemma, being forced to choose between “two evils.” Fear of a harsher sentence as an incentive is unacceptable as it only punishes the innocent.
References
Finkelstein, M. O., & Levin, B. (2020). Why plea bargains are a bad deal for some. Significance, 17(1), 20–25. Web.
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. (2018). The trial penalty: The Sixth Amendment right to trial on the verge of extinction and how to save it. Web.
Schneider, R. A., & Zottoli, T. M. (2019). Disentangling the effects of plea discount and potential trial sentence on decisions to plead guilty. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 24, 288–304. Web.