Plea bargaining was banned by Alaska's Attorney General in August of 1975. The ban extended to all crimes, and forbade both charge and sentence negotiations. Its effects, evaluated by the Alaska Judicial Council in a two-year study, were to increase some sentences, increase trials modestly, and—surprisingly—increase the productivity of the criminal justice system. Explicit plea bargaining appears to have been substantially reduced, without any noticeable commensurate increase in implicit bargaining. The Alaska experience strongly suggests the need to reexamine contemporary thinking about plea bargaining.

Because the literature on plea bargaining disagrees about a definition of the concept, many differences in findings and opinions are more semantic than substantive. The concept of plea bargaining should not be restricted to either pleas or bargains. The fundamental phenomenon is the state's use of coercion to obtain the legal grounds for imposing a penalty.

Increasing concern about the substantial discretion accorded prosecutors in plea negotiations and judges in sentencing decisions has led to a number of proposals to curtail both. In this paper, we assess the consequences of an attempt, simultaneously, to abolish plea bargaining and introduce mandatory sentencing. The Wayne County (Detroit) Prosecutor prohibited his subordinates from plea bargaining in any case in which a recently enacted state statute warranted a mandatory sentence. This statute imposed an additional two-year prison term if a defendant possessed a firearm while committing a felony. Using qualitative data collected from interviews with judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, and quantitative disposition data for the six-month periods before and after the law went into effect, we describe the effects of the new statute on dispositions in Detroit. Though there is some evidence that the law and the prohibition on plea bargaining may have selectively increased severity of sentences for certain classes of defendants, for the most part disposition patterns did not appear to have been altered dramatically. In many serious cases, sentences for the primary felony were adjusted downward to take into account the additional two-year penalty; in “equity” cases, in which defendants had not previously received prison time, other mechanisms, such as abbreviated bench trials, were often employed to circumvent the mandatory sentencing provision.

On the basis of a case study of a U.S. Attorney's office, I sketch differences in the prosecution of white-collar and common crime in order to draw out implications for equality in current proposals to reform plea bargaining. The extent to which the powers of investigation and prosecution are empirically distinct differs with the two categories of crime. Because of greater social distance between prosecutor and investigator in the enforcement of laws against common crimes, formal records give a misleading impression that legitimate prosecutorial power is being bargained away. Because there is relatively little social distance between the prosecutorial and investigative functions in the prosecution of white-collar crime, the formal record greatly underrepresents the exercise of the power not to prosecute. Reforms that would make bargaining over formal dispositions more consistent with legality or “due” process appear likely to discourage lenience in the prosecution of common crimes while leaving largely unaffected the low visibility exercise of the power not to prosecute white-collar crime.

The simple logic of plea bargaining is so compelling that it is now often taken for granted, with the result that its value as an explanation is diminished. Differences among a host of distinct practices may be obscured or ignored when they are lumped together under this single term. This comment examines the practice of pleading guilty to petty offenses in lower courts and questions some of the long-standing assumptions about the dynamics of that process. It shows that though plea bargaining of the classical type rarely occurs, the term itself and certain aspects of bargaining continue to serve important symbolic functions.

This paper explores the use of different types of sentence bargaining tactics in ten federal district courts. We distinguish between proactive and reactive prosecutorial orientation, and hypothesize that proactive prosecution of upperworld crime is associated with more explicit sentence bargaining than is the reactive prosecution of underworld crime. We present evidence for and explanations of this relationship.

The trial judge's role in plea bargaining is examined, using national survey data supplemented by observations and interviews. We analyze the frequency with which judges participate in plea discussions and the organizational, social, and legal contexts that affect the judicial role. Our data suggest the trial judge is often an important or crucial actor in the construction of plea agreements, a finding that contradicts much of the legal and social science literature. Several variables directly influence what role a judge will adopt, including self-perceived skill at negotiating and whether the state has a court rule or case law prohibiting or discouraging judicial participation. Future research should focus upon the impact of judicial participation in plea bargaining.

The strongest critics of plea bargaining argue that the practice should be abolished because it coerces defendants to give up their right to trial and because it results in irrational sentences for criminal defendants. Neither charge is applicable to a system of plea negotiations that meets four basic criteria: (1) the defendant always has the alternative of a jury trial at which both verdict and sentence are determined solely on the merits; (2) the defendant is represented throughout negotiations by competent counsel; (3) both defense and prosecution have equal access to relevant evidence; and (4) both possess sufficient resources to take a case to trial. The most fruitful direction of reform is to seek to achieve these conditions rather than attempt to eliminate plea bargaining.

This paper focuses on the narrow question whether prosecutorial or judicial negotiation of a reduced charge or sentence for a criminal defendant in exchange for a guilty plea renders the plea “involuntary.” I begin by clarifying the conditions under which choices in general are considered voluntary or coerced. In Part II, I measure the practice of plea bargaining against this general theory of voluntary choice. I argue that a negotiated guilty plea is not intrinsically involuntary but that many of the conditions commonly a part of plea bargaining may render it so. The negotiated plea can be defended from the charge of coercion only if these conditions can be, and are, eliminated. I also show that overt “threats” of prosecutorial or judicial reprisal are not the only way of coercing a guilty plea. Under certain conditions, apparent “offers” of leniency can be coercive as well.

The paper is a reply to two defenders of a reformed system of plea bargaining: Thomas Church and Conrad Brunk. At the broadest level, it is argued that plea bargaining is in a twofold conflict with the constitutive purposes of the liberal-democratic idea of a criminal justice system: the practice is not conducive to the punishment of the guilty in accordance with their deserts and it violates basic liberties, among them the right against self-incrimination and the right to the lowest reasonable sentence. It is argued that the value of the jury trial is insufficiently appreciated in Church's analysis. Brunk is criticized for failing to distinguish between two critical responses to plea bargaining: that the agreement made by the defendant should not be honored by the courts and that public officials act wrongfully in coercing such pleas.