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Social science research needs to expand beyond the courtroom and the jury room to address the multitude of factors involved in plea decisions and the influences at work on the various legal system players (e.g., defendants, defense attorneys, prosecutors, etc.). This work is both a culmination of the current state of plea bargaining research and a call to action for future researchers. All of the areas addressed - from innocents pleading guilty to prosecutor charging decisions to mass incarceration and felon disenfranchisement - merge to create a picture of our current criminal justice system as it really is, and how social science can move forward within it.

From its early days in New England townships to its rise to dominance in the 20th century, plea bargaining has always presented both benefits and challenges.But how does a system obtain the benefits of these bargains without jeopardizing the fundamental rights at the center of the criminal justice system?.

The notion of a defendant submitting a false guilty plea due to the penal incentive offered is not an uncommon phenomenon. While the practice has been legitimised based on the defendant’s voluntary informed consent, it has often been argued that the structure of the plea-bargaining practice is coercive. Such can be the case whenever the plea offer entails a significant sentence differential, discrepancy in the form of punishment (a non-custodial sentence relative to a custodial one), or when the alternative of pleading guilty includes the risk of capital punishment. Having said that, plea-bargains have often been classified as a “non-coercive offer”, whether due to their advantageous mutual character according to a baseline conception of coercion or being an offer that one can overcome according to an irresistible psychological account. While many scholars have struggled with the ambiguous notion of “coercive offers,” the paper offers an alternative approach, arguing that it is the type of reasons to be considered within the offer that renders the bargain less than fully autonomous. It will be argued that the plea-bargain proposition infuses irrelevant (guilt-uncorrelated) penal considerations unrelated to the question of guilt. Such considerations are the wrong kind of reason for the guilty-plea decision, and due to the defendant’s dependency on the plea offer, they distort the defendant’s intentional character of her autonomous decision. It is part of the conception of the guilty plea. Though a defendant may autonomously intend to consider irrelevant penal considerations, such a decision cannot be genuinely considered a decision regarding the admission of guilt.

The amendment of the Malaysian Criminal Procedure Code in 2010 formalised the plea-bargaining process and introduced two new sections, 172C and 172D. The new procedures are intended to reduce the backlog of cases in the criminal courts and as a swift alternative to a full criminal trial. However, the law in action does not appear to be in line with the law in the statute book because currently the actors involved in the process are avoiding the use of the new procedural law. Instead, those actors are following the old informal practice of plea-bargaining to achieve their personal goals which may be inconsistent with the organisational goals of the judiciary and prosecution. This paper adopts a qualitative methodology, in which the primary data is obtained from semi-structured interviews with twenty respondents comprising the stakeholders in the criminal justice system.

Zakonom o kaznenom postupku predviđeni su različiti konsenzualni oblici postupanja, uključujući i odredbe čl. 417.a st. 6. i 7. ZKP-a, kojima se ograničavaju ovlasti suda u odmjeravanju kazne za slučaj da se okrivljenik suglasi s kaznenopravnom sankcijom koju je predložio državni odvjetnik. Provedeno istraživanje pokazalo je da se ta odredba u praksi shvaća ekstenzivno, kao oslonac za neformalno sporazumijevanje stranaka prije očitovanja o krivnji, ali i da se i nakon očitovanja o krivnji u praksi nerijetko nastavljaju različiti oblici bilateralnih i trilateralnih dogovaranja o konačnom ishodu kaznenog postupka. U navedenom su istraživanju izloženi i analizirani stavovi i iskustva domaćih pravnih praktičara o toj problematici, s ciljem da se dozna u kojoj su mjeri prisutni i na koji se način u praksi manifestiraju različiti oblici neformalnog sporazumijevanja. Kako bi se dobiveni rezultati bolje razumjeli, u početnom su dijelu rada iznesena teorijska razmatranja o neformalnom sporazumijevanju s aspekta temeljnih načela kaznenog postupka. U tom su dijelu autori iznijeli i argumentirali svoje mišljenje o tome koji su oblici neformalnog sporazumijevanja pravno prihvatljivi i pod kojim uvjetima. U zaključku su rezimirani rezultati istraživanja te se uputilo na određene konceptualne manjkavosti hrvatskog kaznenog procesnog zakonodavstva i prakse.

This book is a study of the social transformation of criminal justice, its institutions, its method of case disposition and the source of its legitimacy. Focused upon the apprehension, investigation and adjudication of indicted cases in New York City’s main trial tribunal in the nineteenth centuryâ the Court of General Sessions it traces the historical underpinnings of a lawyering culture which, in the first half of the 19th century, celebrated trial by jury as the fairest and most reliable method of case disposition and then at the middle of the century dramatically gave birth to plea bargaining, which thereafter became the dominant method of case disposition in the United States. The book demonstrates that the nature of criminal prosecutions in everyday indicted cases was transformed, from disputes between private parties resolved through a public determination of the facts and law to a private determination of the issues between the state and the individual, marked by greater police involvement in the processing of defendants and public prosecutorial discretion. As this occurred, the structural purpose of criminal courts changed - from individual to aggregate justice - as did the method and manner of their dispositions - from trials to guilty pleas. Contemporaneously, a new criminology emerged, with its origins in European jurisprudence, which was to transform the way in which crime was viewed as a social and political problem. The book, therefore, sheds light on the relationship of the method of case disposition to the means of securing social control of an underclass, in the context of the legitimation of a new social order in which the local state sought to define groups of people as well as actual offending in criminogenic terms. “At a moment when France is poised to adopt plea bargaining, McConville and Mirsky offer the best historical account of its emergence in mid-nineteenth century America, based upon exhaustive analysis of archival data. Their interpretation of the reasons for the dramatic shift from jury trials to negotiated justice offers no comfort for contemporary apologists of plea bargaining as more \"professional.\" The combination of new data and critical reflection on accepted theories make this essential reading for anyone interested in criminal justice policy.” Rick Abel, Connell Professor of Law, UCLA Law School “A fascinating account which traces the origins of plea-bargaining in the politicisation of criminal justice, linking developments in day-to-day practices of the criminal process with macro-changes in political economy, notably the structures of local governance. This is a classic socio-legal study and should be read by anyone interested in criminology, criminal justice, modern history or social theory”. Nicola Lacey, Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory, London School of Economics.

ndia’s legal and judicial history is as old the civilisation. Ancient India focused on punishment and retributive justice, but also emphasised on compensating victims. With time and political changes, the legal system in India has undergone several developments. The system in place is in line with the adversarial system that was put in place during the British reign, and was devoid of the restorative justice approach. Post-independence, the judiciary and the legislature has adopted several measures to infuse restorative justice into the system.Through this paper, the author traces the development of restorative justice in India, in particular, the emergence of compensatory jurisprudence into Indian laws. The author traces the advent of the Panchayat System as a supposed center for restorative justice at the level of the smallest unit of governance, i.e., the villages. The dangers due to the operation of regressive khap panchayats would be critically deliberated. Further, the contribution discusses the incorporation of restorative justice policies into certain critical legislation. The author will go on to study the emergence of plea bargaining and Lok Adalat. Finally, the author examines the need to include restorative justice in sexual assaults cases, and also explore the way forward.

En este artículo, se abordará una crítica al rezago en el que se encuentran las normas procedimentales laborales. Se utilizarán como ejemplo tres figuras: las notificaciones, la impugnabilidad del auto que resuelve sobre el mandamiento de pago y las alegaciones en segunda instancia. Esto para dejar entrever el cambio de filosofía que se requiere para que instituciones como la sentencia anticipada puedan implementarse, justificando, además, que al aceptar la tesis propuesta se propende por materializar los derechos sustanciales de quienes acuden al aparato judicial, especialmente los trabajadores. Así, también se permite cumplir con el fin del nuevo proceso, el cual es la descongestión.

The criminal justice system processes millions of cases per year. To handle so much volume, it needs to operate like a factory. The system requires an efficient information economy that takes complex fact patterns and reduces them to abstract, simplified, and standardized inputs. Each defendant who comes into the courthouse is thus reduced to a limited set of well-defined data points--their current criminal charge and their past arrests and convictions. This simplification renders defendants legible to the system and capable of efficient processing. The courthouse workgroup (prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges) decides case outcomes based on a well-defined plea bargain market that is keyed to those inputs. This plea bargain market is structured by statutes, sentencing guidelines, prosecutorial policies, and local courthouse norms. The courthouse workgroup determines how the plea bargain market functions and shares a collective sense of each case's \"value\" based on these limited inputs. The lawyers negotiate efficiently around standard plea offers and keep the factory humming.