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| Joined: | Mon Nov 21st, 2005 |
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The U.S. Supreme Court's Failure to Fix Plea Bargaining: The Impact of Lafler and Frye
Plea bargaining is deeply entrenched in the U.S. criminal justice system. Overall, ninety-four percent to ninety-seven percent of criminal cases are resolved by guilty pleas and not through trials.' Plea bargaining in the United States began in the late eighteenth century and became the "dominant means of resolving criminal cases" by the nineteenth century.'
The criticism includes that plea bargaining fails to protect defendants' rights,o is a form of torture, is overly coercive, 2 leads defendants to "game" the system," fails to take victims into account, 4 reinforces inequality (particularly towards ethnic minorities)," leads to disparate sentencing," gives defendants better deals than they deserve," and undermines our system of justice due to its overuse at the expense of jury trials." Critics of plea bargaining express concern both about specific aspects of plea bargaining'9 and about the system as a whole.20