Responses: Plea bargaining
posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review
PENNumbra‘s featured November responses are now available at www.pennumbra.com.
This month, Frank O. Bowman, III, Michael M. O’Hear, and Daniel Richman each respond to Ronald F. Wright’s article, Trial Distortion and the End of Innocence in Federal Criminal Justice, 154 U. Pa. L. Rev. 79 (2005). In his article, Professor Wright addresses the challenges to the judicial system from the rise of plea bargaining rates in the United States. He argues that reform is best accomplished through a “mid-level” regulatory strategy—what he calls the “trial distortion theory”—that neither condemns nor endorses the plea bargaining process, but asks if pleas are distorting the pattern of outcomes that would result from a “healthy” system in which trials were the norm.
Professor Bowman, in his Response, American Buffalo: Vanishing Acquittals and the Gradual Extinction of the Federal Criminal Trial Lawyer, picks up on one of Professor Wright’s key findings: “the curious fact that the rate of acquittals in federal criminal cases has declined even faster than the rate of guilty pleas has increased.” Professor Bowman goes on to suggest that “acquittals may be vanishing in part because a once-common courtroom denizen—the true trial lawyer—is becoming an endangered species,” and worries that the system has created “ever-greater disincentives to trying the kind of cases in which acquittal is a live possibility.”
Professor O’Hear, in his response, What’s Good About Trials?, questions whether trial distortion represents a significant problem. Professor O’Hear
believes our main focus should be on “mak[ing] plea bargaining processes look more like trial processes.” According to Professor O’Hear, “The trick is to find ways of injecting the values of voice, neutrality, and respect into the plea bargaining process without robbing plea bargaining of its efficiency advantages over the trial process.”
Finally, Professor Richman, in his Response, Judging Untried Cases, applauds Professor Wright for attempting to determine whether “the inexorable reduction in trials actually reflects an impairment of the federal criminal system’s truth-finding function.” However, he notes that Professor Wright overlooked one important factor in his analysis: the extent to which “the vanishing acquittal rate reflects an increase in the [federal] adoption of well-established ‘local’ cases.” Without more information, Professor Richman concludes, “aggregrate caseload statistics are . . . hard to interpret.”
As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review’s print edition articles.
November 30, 2007 at 9:54 am
Posted in: Law Rev (Penn), Law Rev Forum
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