Plea Bargains, Convictions and Legitimacy

Though it enhances the justice system’s efficiency, plea bargaining increases the incidence of wrongful convictions by inducing innocent defendants to plead guilty. Plea bargaining generates outcomes that are often related less to the weight of the evidence and actual guilt than the discretion of the prosecutor and the temperament of defendants seeking leniency. Treating bargained-for convictions as formally identical to trial convictions undermines the legitimacy of the justice system. While the standard of proof at trial is beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard for bargained-for convictions effectively becomes mere probable cause. This denies defendants a meaningful opportunity to be heard and makes bargaining less reliable for determining actual guilt than a trial. Bargaining also gives defendants an incentive to lie; they must accept the prosecutor’s version of events to secure the benefit of a more lenient sentence. To limit further harms and promote fairness, the justice system can treat bargained-for guilty pleas as “something less” than a formal conviction, such as the enforcement of a contract between the government and the defendant. Additionally, bargained-for pleas should effectively be Alford or nolo pleas that never require admission of actual guilt.

“Fundamentally, whereas trials consist of a formal method for presenting and evaluating evidence, plea bargains are only tangentially related to the evidence. Therefore, while trials can generate erroneous results too, and while we cannot know the number of wrongful convictions resulting from plea bargains, the process designed around formal evaluation of the evidence is more likely to achieve correct results than the bargaining process.” p. 158–59