Plea Bargains, Concessions and the Courts: Analysis of a Quasi-experiment

National debate over the predominance of plea bargaining in the administration of criminal justice in America has become increasingly strident over the past several years. Positions range from the almost unqualified endorsement of plea bargaining practices by no less an authority than the Chief Justice of the United States, through the American Bar Association's (1963) typically moderate proposal for improving procedural safeguards, to the recommendation of total abolition of the practice by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals (1973). Because of a dearth of hard data concerning the effects of plea bargaining on the criminal justice system, debate over the proposals has tended to produce more heat than light. In the trenchant understatement of one surveyer of the subject, “[s]uch recommendations suffer from insufficient empirical grounding and could benefit from further research on plea bargaining” (Mulkey, 1974: 54).