Plea Bargaining

Plea Bargaining

CJA/224

May 4, 2015

Plea Bargaining

Plea bargaining is essential to the administration of justice. If every defendant demanded his or her right to a jury trial and succeeded in such a demand, the criminal justice system would literally collapse (Siegel, Schmalleger, & Worrall, 2011). Plea bargains take the administration of justice out of the hands of judges and juries and turn it over to prosecutors and defense attorneys. Plea bargaining essentially permits the attorneys to decide the outcome of a case without the need to go to trial, and it is well known that when two defendants face the same charge, the one who plea-bargains invariably receives a lesser sentence than the one who does not (Siegel, Schmalleger, & Worrall, 2011). While plea bargaining is one of the most widely obtained convictions for the prosecution there are advantages and disadvantages involved.

History of Plea Bargaining

Plea bargaining has a long history. Cases referencing plea agreements go all the way back to the nineteenth century. One of the earliest reported court decisions addressing plea bargaining was Commonwealth v. Battis (1 Mass. 95, 1804). In that case, a court was hesitant to permit a guilty plea by a defendant charged with a capital crime, so the court gave the defendant time to contemplate his plea and even “examined, under oath, the sheriff, the jailer and justice . . ., as to the sanity of the prisoner; and whether there had been tampering with him, either by promises, persuasions, or hopes of pardon if he would plead guilty.” (Siegel, Schmalleger, & Worrall, 2011). This portion of the court’s decision suggests that, perhaps, some degree of plea bargaining took place in the early 1800s.

Plea bargaining became even more common in the early to middle 1900s. Many states had by then impaneled commissions to study the workings of their criminal justice systems, and the studies published by these commissions reported an increase in the...