Plea Bargaining

Plea Bargaining

Discuss whether or not plea bargaining should be abolished?

There are many proposed reforms to address these problems. Some of the more common include the following: (1) Increase the budget of the criminal-justice system so that more trials occur. (2) Give financial incentives to prosecutors to limit their discretion and make plea negotiations between prosecution and defense better balanced. (3) Screen prosecutors more closely in the charging decision. (4) Restructure the economic relationship between attorneys and their clients so that the former have better capacities and incentives for zealous representation. (5) Require preplea disclosure to make negotiations more equal and a defendant's decision to plead guilty better informed. (6) Make judges take a more active role in plea negotiations so that prosecutors, in fact, do not determine sentences (Wilburt, 2006). (7) Enforce more strictly government concessions in plea agreements, which will protect defendants against defense-attorney errors in plea agreements and limit prosecutorial manipulation of broad mandatory-sentencing statutes. (8) Replace misdemeanor trials with the German system of penal orders. (9) Offer defendants incentives to choose bench trials. (10) Simplify the current trial by jury or replace the trial by jury with trial before mixed courts so that there are fewer incentives for plea agreements. (11) Abolish plea bargaining altogether (Alschuler, 2007).

Defenders of plea bargaining argue that the mechanism is a fair way of disposing of cases because the prosecutor takes into consideration the chances to win the trial when she makes her offer. In addition, the prosecutor is probably in a better position than jurors are to determine whether the defendant is guilty or innocent, because the prosecutor has access to information that may not be admissible or produced at trial. Pleabargaining defenders also claim that even if the practice presents serious problems, trials themselves often have problems and one should ...