Plea Bargaining: An Inevitable Part of US Criminal Justice? - Essay Sample

Introduction

Plea bargaining is a legal term that refers to an arrangement between the prosecutor and the defendant, where the person accused pleads guilty to lesser charges. Doing so leads to an agreement to drop severe charges or exchange for a more lenient sentence. Legal experts, including commentators, have argued that plea bargaining is inevitable because it is deeply rooted in the country's criminal justice system (Alkon, 2013). Research shows that 94-97% of the criminal cases in the US do not go through the trial process but instead resolved by guilty pleas (Alkon, 2013). The history of plea barging in the US dates back to the late 19th century when the country started relying on this modality to resolve a vast majority of its criminal cases (Alkon, 2013). However, the use of plea bargains has continuously increased across states. Legal experts have argued that the US has reached a point where there are no criminal trials in some jurisdictions because plea bargaining is increasingly becoming inevitable (Alkon, 2013). In Texas, however, cases that involve severe offenses tend to go to trial, but it accounts for a small percentage. This aspect implies that if an individual is arrested in Texas, it is most likely that juries will resolve their cases through plea bargaining. Therefore, Texas should fix its plea bargaining laws because it gives defendants better deals than they deserve, and it also fails to take victims into account.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Laws Regulating Plea Bargaining in Texas

Texas Disciplinary Rules of professional conduct provide comprehensive guidelines to enhance fairness in plea bargaining and also regulate the process itself. The Supreme Court has held that a guilty plea must be intelligent and, more importantly, voluntary (Wilkinson, 2007). This phenomenon suggests that defendants must consent plea bargains without any coercion from state counsel. Accused people should also be in a position to understand what they are doing, and must act knowingly. Besides, there must be sufficient evidence in records to prove that the defendant voluntarily and knowingly gave up their constitutional rights and pled guilty. The existence of this requirement suggests that statutory pleading laws in Texas tend to focus on what the legal team must keep in court records as part of the plea colloquy. It also means that such disciplinary rules tend to focus on the rights that defendants will waive.

Texas has comprehensive laws that define the constitutionality of plea bargaining. While a defendant cannot appeal plea bargaining decisions, the defense counsel's incorrect assessment of cases against the accused people would not invalidate a proper plea (Wilkinson, 2007). The Due Process Clause also prohibits state prosecutors from forgoing a plea bargain if the accused pleads guilty but simultaneously attests their innocence. Besides, a plea bargain that the defendants take as a way to avoid severe penalties does not violate the Fifth Amendment (Wilkinson, 2007).

Criticism Against Plea Bargaining

Legal experts have raised concerns about overreliance on plea bargaining in Texas, among other states (Alkon, 2017). To many people, the Supreme Court case Lafler and Frye ought to have addressed issues surrounding the overreliance of plea negotiations, which has gone unresolved in courts (Alkon, 2017). The criticism includes that plea bargaining in Texas is overly coercive, is a form of torture, and has failed to protect the rights of the defendants. Also, legal commentators have argued that plea bargaining reinforces inequalities in Texas (Alkon, 2017). This problem, according to Alkon (2017), is more significant among ethnic minorities residing in Texas. Critics of pleas bargaining have also claimed that the approach encourages the accused people to "game" the system, and it gives them better deals that they do not deserve. Besides, there are concerns that Texas has hard plea bargaining, where defendants encounter coercion, threats of additional charges, and even seek the death penalty (Alkon, 2017).

According to Weninger (2015), a notion that plea bargaining is inevitable in Taxa's criminal courts, and the justice system of the United States has gained nearly unanimous acceptance among practitioners and knowledgeable scholars. A belief that this approach of resolving cases is unavoidable is more pervasive in Texas that it is challenging to sustain debate over its desirability. Legal scholars have offered two explanations that underpin the inevitability of plea bargaining (Weninge, 2015). The first explanation is about caseload pressure in Texas, which has experienced a high rate of violent crimes and property offenses in the recent past. In this regard, the point is that plea bargaining is of great importance in moving criminal dockets with minimal costs. It also addresses problems surrounding delays in hearing cases, which would generate if courts rely on trial alone. The second factor is that there is an irrepressible tendency towards low-level coordination among legal teams in the courtroom. This phenomenon implies that judges, counsel, and other parties in the court system would circumvent the efforts to end plea bargains. The two hypotheses, according to Weninge (2015), assumes that Texas cannot implement genuinely useful methods that can forbid plea bargaining. However, the first hypothesis is relatively more pessimistic than the first theory. The reason is that it recognizes that even without caseload pressures, Texas can still implement a bargaining plea because of critical factors that underpin the social systems.

There is evidence that overreliance on plea bargains adversely shapes the conduct of state prosecutors and the quality of oversight by law enforcement agencies (Trials & Freshfields, 2017). The reason is that police abuses like unlawful stops, fabrication of evidence, illegal search, and arrests may not come to light if a trial does not occur. In extreme cases, however, professionals in the court system may use the pleas to "launder" or "cleanse" cases that are too tainted by torture, among other human rights abuses that ought to go to trial. Critics of pleas have further said that if the evidence on mistreatment made public during criminal trials, it might become a basis of claims for compensation of civil liability abusers (Trials & Freshfields, 2017). Besides, there are concerns of repeated scandals in Texas, where the accused have accepted plea deals in charges where the prosecuting authorities failed to test supporting evidence (Trials & Freshfields, 2017). In Houston, Texas, for instance, legal experts have questioned hundreds of convictions involving drug cases, following a discovery that the underlying evidence had high error rates (Trials & Freshfields, 2017). Despite the innocence of the defendants, all of them accepted plea deals even before the prosecution properly tested their evidence.

Conclusion

Plea bargaining in Texas is marred with a lot of controversies, and its overreliance in resolving cases adversely impacts the defendants and plaintiffs. Some of the issues that defendants face as they seek plea bargains are threats of incorporating case enhancements and additional charges to their cases. They also experience threats of seeking the death penalty, among other tactics that characterize hard bargaining.

References

Alkon, C. (2017). Hard Bargaining in Plea Bargaining: When Do Prosecutors Cross the Line? Nevada Law Journal, 17(5), 401. Retrieved 10 December 2019, from https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1859&context=facscholar/url/

Alkon, C. (2013). The US Supreme Court's Failure to Fix Plea Bargaining: The Impact of Lafler and Frye. Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 41(3), 561. Retrieved 10 December 2019, from https://static1.squarespace.com/static/591ccf16db29d6afe8606726/t/5933aaa315d5dbea570fe5b7/1496558244486/Alkon_Online.pdf/url/

Trials, F., & Freshfields, F. B. (2017). The Disappearing trial: Towards a rights-based approach to trial waiver systems. Technical Report, Fair Trials. Retrieved 10 December 2019, from https://fairtrials.org/sites/default/files/publication_pdf/Report-The-Disappearing-Trial.pdf/url/

Weninger, R. A. (2015). The Abolition of Plea Bargaining: A Case Study of El Paso County, Texas. UCLA Law Review, 35, (2), 265. doi:10.1093/obo/9780195396607-0268

Wilkinson, E. L. (2007). Ethical Plea Bargaining Under the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct. St. Mary's Law Journal, 39(3), 717-727. Retrieved 10 December 2019, from http://www.texasbarcle.com/Materials/Events/6709/91336_01.pdf/url