Explore the vast range of titles available.

ObjectivesAlthough the literature suggests wrongful guilty pleas exist, less attention has been devoted to the false guilty pleas to probation sentences. We examined the plea decision-making process when participants faced probation.MethodsWe conducted a 2 (guilt status: innocent or guilty) × 2 (probation length: 1 year or 5 years) × 2 (probation obligations: general or detailed disclosure) between-participant experiment using an online sample (N = 906). Participants were randomly assigned to one of eight conditions and were asked whether they would accept a plea offer.ResultsParticipants who were guilty and faced a shorter probation sentence were more likely to plead guilty. Participants receiving detailed disclosure were less likely to plead guilty, but the effect was less robust. Participants who faced a longer sentence and received detailed disclosure reported larger declines in plea willingness.ConclusionThe findings suggest that criminal defendants are sensitive to the length and disclosure of probation sentences.

Objectives It is well established that defendants who plead guilty receive reduced sentences compared to the likely outcome if convicted at trial. Prominent theories of plea bargaining posit that the plea discount is determined by the strength of the evidence against the defendant. Research on this claim has produced mixed findings, however, and others have suggested that discounts may be influenced by extra-legal characteristics such as race, age, and sex. To date, there have been few attempts to directly compare the effects of these factors on plea discount estimates. Methods This study uses a penalized ridge regression to predict counterfactual trial sentences for a sample of defendants who pled guilty. Plea discounts are estimated using each defendant’s predicted trial sentence and observed plea sentence. Discount estimates are then regressed on variables related to case evidence and the demographic characteristics of the defendant. Results Results suggest that increases in the amount of evidence associated with a case lead to decreases in the size of the plea discount. Both main and interaction effects are observed for race/ethnicity and sex, with Hispanic and male defendants receiving significantly smaller discounts than White or female defendants. Calculation of standardized effect sizes further indicates that demographic characteristics exert larger effects on plea discount estimates than evidentiary variables. Conclusions Plea discounts appear to be influenced by both evidence and extra-legal factors. Legal participants may indeed consider the strength of the evidence when determining acceptable plea discounts, but this alone appears to be an insufficient explanation.

In this Article, Professors Dervan and Edkins discuss a recent psychological study they completed regarding plea bargaining and innocence. The study, involving dozens of college students and taking place over several months, revealed that more than half of the innocent participants were willing to falsely admit guilt in return for a benefit. These research findings bring significant new insights to the long-standing debate regarding the extent of plea bargaining's innocence problem. The Article also discusses the history of bargained justice and examines the constitutional implications of the study's results on plea bargaining, an institution the Supreme Court reluctantly approved of in 1970 in return for an assurance that it would not be used to induce innocent defendants to falsely admit guilt.

Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Dec. 21 that Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, two former colleagues of Sam Bankman-Fried, pleaded guilty to federal criminal fraud charges.

Objectives This study examines how confession (versus eyewitness) evidence and guilt status impacts mock defendants’ plea decisions and perceptions of their probability of conviction (PoC) and the strength of evidence (SoE), key elements of the shadow-of-the-trial model. Methods In a simulated mock-theft scenario, adult participants ( n  = 239) were randomly assigned to a guilt status (guilty/innocent) and evidence-type (confession/eyewitness) condition. They were offered a plea, and perceptions of PoC and SoE were measured. Results As predicted, confession evidence led to higher rates of pleas than eyewitness evidence. Guilty participants were also more likely to accept the plea than innocent participants. However, evidence type did not impact perceptions of PoC or SoE, though guilt status did. Conclusions Our findings empirically support the impact that confessions—true or false—and guilt status have on plea decision-making. We discuss implications of these results for the shadow-of-the-trial model and the cumulative-disadvantage framework.

In 2008, the Illinois State Legislature found that “innocent persons who have been wrongly convicted of crimes in Illinois and subsequently imprisoned have been frustrated in seeking legal redress due to a variety of substantive and technical obstacles in the law[.]” To correct this injustice, the General Assembly created a petition for a Certificate of Innocence (“COI”), which provides wrongfully convicted individuals the opportunity to obtain financial relief for time spent incarcerated. Petitioners must show that they “did not by [their] own conduct voluntarily cause or bring about [their] conviction.” Notably, the legislature did not supply a definition for “voluntary,” leaving courts free to impart their own. Despite the legislature’s recognition that “substantive and technical obstacles” prevent wrongly convicted individuals from relief, Illinois courts have imposed such obstacles through the term “voluntary.” In some instances, courts ignore this critical term by entirely omitting it from statutory analysis; in others, courts use “voluntary” to deny COIs. In the judiciary’s view, an individual “voluntarily cause[s] or bring[s] about” their conviction when they confess to a crime or accept a plea deal, regardless of the circumstances. This interpretation ignores the innocence of a person whose confession was coerced or accepted a plea deal under circumstances disguised as a rational choice. Although granting a COI is “generally within the sound discretion of a court,” the Illinois judiciary has improperly imposed a condition absent from the text that, carried to its logical conclusion, would deny COIs to innocent people. This Comment explores the purpose of Section 2-702, contemplates “voluntary” conduct, and illuminates the implications of judicial frustration. The case of Wayne Washington exemplifies the judiciary’s abuse of discretion and its imposition of substantive and technical obstacles that the Illinois legislature sought to overcome by enacting Section 2-702. Finally, this Comment argues that COIs are the only adequate remedy for wrongfully convicted individuals and proposes legislative and judicial solutions.

Objectives Approximately 95 % of convictions in the United States are the result of guilty pleas. Surprisingly little is known about the factors which judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys consider in these decisions. To examine the legal and extralegal factors that legal actors consider in plea decision-making, we replicated and improved upon a 40-year-old study by asking legal actor participants to review a variety of case factors, and then make plea decisions and estimate sentences for pleas and trials (upon conviction). Methods Over 1,500 defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges completed an online survey involving a hypothetical legal case in which the presence of three types of evidence and length of defendant criminal history were experimentally manipulated. Results The manipulated evidence impacted plea decisions and discounts, whereas criminal history only affected plea discounts (i.e., the difference between plea and trial sentences). Defense attorneys considered the largest number of factors (evidentiary and non-evidentiary), and although legal actor role influenced the decision to plead, it did not affect the discount. Conclusions In replicating a landmark study, via technological advances not available in the 1970s, we were able to increase our sample size nearly six-fold, obtain a sample representing all 50 states, and include judges. However, our sample was nonrepresentative and the hypothetical scenario may or may not generalize to actual situations. Nonetheless, valuable information was gained about the factors considered and weighed by legal actors.

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.

False confessions are a contributing factor in almost 30% of DNA exonerations in the United States. Similar problems have been documented all over the world. We present a novel framework to highlight the processes through which innocent people, once misidentified as suspects, experience cumulative disadvantages that culminate in pernicious consequences. The cumulative-disadvantage framework details how the innocent suspect’s naivete and the interrogator’s presumption of guilt trigger a process that can lead to false confession, the aftereffects of which spread to corrupt evidence gathering, bias forensic analysis, and virtually ensure wrongful convictions at trial or through pressured false guilty pleas. The framework integrates nascent research underscoring the enduring effects of the accumulated disadvantages postconviction and even after exoneration. We synthesize findings from psychological science, corroborating naturalistic evidence, and relevant legal precedents to explain how an innocent suspect’s disadvantages can accumulate through the actions of law enforcement, forensic examiners, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, juries, and appeals courts. We conclude with prescribed research directions that can lead to empirically driven reforms to address the gestalt of the multistage process.

It has been well established that a \"plea discount\" or \"trial penalty\" exists, such that defendants who plead guilty receive significant sentencing discounts relative to what they would receive if convicted at trial. Theorists argue that the exact value of this plea discount is determined by bargaining \"in the shadow of a trial,\" meaning that plea decision-making is premised on the perceived probable outcome of a trial. In trials, the strength of the evidence against defendants greatly impacts the probability of conviction. In the present study, we estimate the probability of conviction at the individual level for those who pled guilty. We find that, contrary to the shadow of the trial model, evidentiary factors either do not impact or negatively impact the probability of conviction, which stands in stark contrast to the impact evidence has at trials. These findings suggest that plea bargain decision-making may not occur in the shadow of the trial.