Plea bargaining dominated American courts by the early 1900s, not recently
Evidence
Although U.S. courts discouraged guilty pleas during the early nineteenth century, by the early 1900s, plea bargaining had become the primary means of processing cases in many criminal courts. This can be seen not only in the frequency of guilty pleas-in 1926, more than 90 percent of all felony convictions in Manhattan and Brooklyn resulted from such pleas-but also in prosecutors’ willingness to reduce charges against defendants. In New York in 1926, for instance, 85 percent of all guilty pleas in felony cases were to sia less serious than the original charges, and in Chicago the figure was 78 percent.7! These figures suggest that plea bargaining was as frequent i in the 1920s as it is today, so subsequentein- Also, if plea bargaining were a result of heavy caseloads, then courts with heavier caseloads would rely on plea bargaining more than would courts with lighter caseloads. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1767
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Caseload pressures alone cannot explain plea bargaining rates; Plea bargaining operates as a rough informal system of precedent — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1751; Prosecutors, not judges, dominate U.S. criminal outcomes via plea bargaining (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Prosecutors, not judges, dominate U.S. criminal outcomes via plea bargaining
#expands(0.85) - Racial disparity in plea bargaining is nearly unstudied despite its centrality
#expands(0.80) — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 619 - Guilty pleas, not trials, now dominate criminal case disposition
#corroborates(0.80)