Content and Comprehensibility of Juvenile and Adult Tender-of-Plea Forms: Implications for Knowing, Intelligent, and Voluntary Guilty Pleas

This article contains a study on both the content and comprehensibility of tender-of-plea (ToP) forms for both juvenile and adult defendants. The piece discusses the information defendants are expected to know when entering a plea and the degree to which defendants are able to understand this information. The authors analyzed 256 ToP forms, 142 adult forms and 66 juvenile forms. The study reveals that these forms vary greatly in their content, are often beyond the reading comprehension of most defendants, and are more often available to adult than juvenile defendants. The article concludes with the finding that these ToP forms cannot replace full judicial plea colloquies or a meaningful discussion between a defendant and his or her attorney about a plea decision.

“[T]he highly variable content and difficult comprehensibility of the plea forms in our study, for both adults and juveniles, leaves us less than optimistic that ToP forms—when they exist—adequately safeguard the constitutional mandate that guilty pleas be knowing, voluntary, and intelligent. Wider adoption of the forms, or even requiring both written forms and oral colloquies, would likely benefit defendant understanding and appreciation, as the information would be received via two modalities, rather than one.” p. 172