Plea bargaining: on the selection of jury trials

Abstract

We consider a model of the criminal court process, focusing on plea bargaining. A plea bargain provides unequal incentives to go to trial because innocent defendants are more willing to plead not guilty. We show that the court process implements the preferences of the person or group who is most concerned about wrongful conviction. If a prosecutor is more concerned about wrongful conviction than the jury, the prosecutor can shape the defendant pool at trial so that jurors act according to prosecutor’s preferences against judicial mistakes. Our model also connects insights from strategic jury models that usually omit plea bargaining with the actual criminal court process where most cases are resolved through plea bargaining. As an example, we show that the inferiority of the unanimity rule established in Feddersen and Pesendorfer (Am Polit Sci Rev 92(1):23–35, 1998) persists in spite of the addition of plea bargaining.