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Plea Bargaining Policy and State District Court Caseloads: An Interrupted Time Series Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Malcolm D. Holmes ,
Howard C. Daudistel  and
William A. Taggart
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Abstract

Questions about the relation of court caseloads to plea bargaining practices generate much controversy but little sophisticated empirical research. Here we examine the effects of a 1975 felony plea bargaining ban in the Texas district courts in El Paso. Relying on a quasi-experimental interrupted time series model with annual data for 1968–83, we test the hypothesis that the discontinuance of plea bargaining negatively affects court caseloads, specifically the proportion of cases going to jury trial and the disposition rate. We also examine conviction rate, exploring whether the existence of plea bargaining encourages prosecutors to accept weak cases. We find a considerable increase in the proportion of cases going to jury trial immediately after the ban's implementation and a substantial but gradual decrease in the disposition rate. The jury trial rate contributed substantially to the disposition rate decline. The conviction rate was generally unaffected by the ban, although it became more consistent after the ban. Overall our findings suggest that the ban on explicit plea bargaining did affect the district courts' ability to move the felony docket efficiently.

Type
On Caseloads and Plea Bargaining
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , 1992 , pp. 139 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This article is a revision of a paper presented at the 1988 annual meeting of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, San Francisco. We greatly appreciate the helpful comments from the anonymous reviewers of Law & Society Review. Thanks also to Vicki Harley-Taggart for graph preparation and Graciela Hernandez for secretarial assistance.

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