Plea Bargaining: Negotiated Justice

Abstract

This chapter introduces another player in the criminal process, the prosecutor, who is instrumental in the determination of actual criminal punishments through the practice of plea bargaining. Under plea bargaining, which is a literal negotiation between prosecutors and defendants over criminal sentences, prosecutors exercise considerable discretion regarding both what charge to bring and what sentence to offer. The vast majority of criminal convictions in the United States are achieved in this way. The chapter reviews economic theories of this practice and emphasizes the trade-off between the resulting savings in trial costs and the risk of wrongful conviction. It concludes by examining how plea bargaining affects the goals of deterrence and corrective justice.