In this Article, Professors Dervan and Edkins discuss a recent psychological study they completed regarding plea bargaining and innocence. The study, involving dozens of college students and taking place over several months, revealed that more than half of the innocent participants were willing to falsely admit guilt in return for a benefit. These research findings bring significant new insights to the long-standingSpecial thanks to Professors
A psycholegal research agenda on guilty pleas is in its nascent stage. Multijurisdictional surveys of related law and policy may advance this research agenda by focusing investigators on the specifics of existing policies and motivating cross‐jurisdictional comparisons of diverse policies. We thus conducted a systematic, national survey of statutes, regulations and court rules across the United States pertaining to nine aspects of the guilty plea process, including sentencing differentials, collateral consequences and waiver of rights, which have been identified in existing legal and psycholegal research and commentary. Following a discussion of these issues, including legal concerns and existing research findings, we present the results of our systematic survey. We supplement this review with a non‐systematic sampling of appellate case law. Broadly, there was notable diversity in whether and how jurisdictions approached these issues. We discuss general and specific implications of our findings for future research, emphasizing the importance of data on actual policies and procedures to the design of studies that may contribute to evidence‐based criminal justice policy.
With a criminal conviction comes numerous restrictions on rights, and often these collateral consequences are not adequately communicated to a defendant accepting a plea deal. The question we posed was whether or not informing individuals of collateral consequences would alter their decisions to plead. Using prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984) and the theory of temporal discounting (Ainslie, 1975), we hypothesized that the delayed nature of collateral consequences—especially if the consequences were competing with overly enticing immediate rewards to accepting a plea deal, namely the ability to be released from pretrial detention—would not have the desired effect of exerting a strong influence on decisions to plead. Across two studies—the first, an exploratory within-subjects design; the second, a more controlled between-subjects design—we found that while actual guilt mattered the most with regard to decisions to plead, pretrial detention also weighed heavy (especially influential in challenging our innocent participants’ steadfastness to hold out for a trial). Collateral consequences did not have as large of an impact, especially if pretrial detention was involved. We also saw that, in general, participants were not opposed to the imposition of most collateral consequences. Future directions for plea bargaining research are discussed.
We investigated plea bargaining by making students actually guilty or innocent of a cheating offense and varying the sentence that they would face if found 'guilty' by a review board. As hypothesized, guilty students were more likely than innocent students to accept a plea deal (i.e., admit guilt and lose credit; akin to accepting a sentence of probation) (Chi-square=8.63, p<.01) but we did not find an effect of sentence severity. Innocent students, though not as likely to plead as guilty students, showed an overall preference (56% across conditions) for accepting a plea deal. Implications and future directions are discussed. Research on Plea Bargaining Empirical research on plea bargaining has mainly focused on the attorney's role and decisionmaking process (Edkins, 2011; Kramer, Wolbransky, & Heilbrun, 2007), presumably because the client's side is much more difficult to study. Studies looking at pleas from the defendant's
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.