Plea discounts, time pressures, and false-guilty pleas in youth and adults who pleaded guilty to felonies in New York City.

Zottoli, Tina M.; Daftary‐Kapur, Tarika; Winters, Georgia M.; Hogan, Conor

doi:10.1037/law0000095

Cited by 55 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 41 publications

(50 reference statements)

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“…We have demonstrated a new approach to the study of plea bargains that enables researchers to shed empirical light on whether plea bargains result in a miscarriage of justice. It is consistent with existing research on wrongful convictions (Huff et al 1996;Loeffler et al 2018) and false guilty pleas (Gudjonnson and Sigurdsson 2008;Redlich et al 2010;Zottoli et al 2016) that rely on offender self-reports or expert evaluations. Defenders of plea bargaining argue that even if innocent people plead guilty, this does no injustice since they probably would have been convicted had they gone to trial.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 88%

“…These concerns have been underscored by the large numbers of exonerated defendants in the US who pled guilty: 397 of the 2167 exonerations (18%) identified from 1989 through 2017 (National Registry of Exonerations 2017). A recent survey of inmates indicates that 6% of respondents believed they were completely innocent of their crimes (Loeffler et al 2018), and other surveys have reported over one-third of prisoners with mental illnesses reported ever having made a false guilty plea (Redlich et al 2010; see also Gudjonnson and Sigurdsson 2008;Zottoli et al 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Plea Bargaining and the Miscarriage of Justice

2019

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Objectives We examine whether, on average, plea bargaining encourages guilty pleas among defendants who are factually innocent. Methods We develop a formal theory of plea bargaining in which defendants take into account the possibility of false convictions or acquittals when making plea-bargain decisions. We use an incidentally truncated bivariate probit model to test the theory, which predicts that if innocent defendants plead guilty, the correlation (ρ) between the unobserved heterogeneity regarding selection into trial and regarding conviction at trial should be sufficiently positive. The method does not require knowledge of whether individual defendants are factually guilty or innocent. Since ρ is also predicted to vary directly with the unobserved toughness of prosecutors, we develop a decomposition theorem to distinguish between the effects of defendants and prosecutors in plea bargain decisions. Results Using data on 2012 criminal cases decided in Israeli courts from 2010 to 2011, we find that ρ is large and positive. Hence, defendants who did not plea bargain were positively selected in terms of conviction. This means that defendants who accepted plea bargains had smaller counterfactual conviction probabilities than observationally similar defendants who went to trial. ConclusionsThe results indicate that, on average, factually innocent defendants in Israel during this period took plea bargains instead of going to trial. This contradicts "innocence effect" theory, which predicts that factually innocent defendants, on average, reject plea bargains. Our findings are important for research on shadow trial theory, since they show that selection into plea bargains cannot be ignored when inferring counterfactual trial outcomes for plea bargainers.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 88%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plea Bargaining and the Miscarriage of Justice

2019

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“…Estimates derived from sentencing data may obscure the size of the plea discount perceived (i.e., felt or experienced) by the defendant who is considering his plea offer against the threatened potential penalty if convicted at trial. In a recent field study, adult defendants in New York City reported accepting plea offers that were discounted from the threatened trial sentence by more than 80%; discounts were even more extreme for juveniles (Zottoli, Daftary‐Kapur, Winters, & Hogan, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disentangling the effects of plea discount and potential trial sentence on decisions to plead guilty

Schneider

Zottoli

2019

Legal Criminol Psychol

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Background Most criminal convictions are a result of guilty pleas. Concerns have been raised that large differentials between plea and potential trial sentences can be coercive to some defendants, especially when the threat of potential trial sentence is very large. The limited research, to date, suggests that the likelihood of pleading guilty goes up with increasing size of potential trial sentence. However, existing studies have failed to separate the effects of trial sentence and plea discount; as a result, in almost all studies, large potential trial sentences are paired with large discounts and small trial sentences with small discounts, making it difficult to know how the threat of trial sentence actually affects defendant decisions. Method In this study, we examined the effects of guilt, magnitude of potential trial sentence (5 years and 25 years), and size of plea discount (20%, 50%, and 75%) in a fully crossed, between‐subjects design, with acceptance of plea offer as the dependent variable. Results We found that potential trial sentence and plea discount had independent and opposite effects on plea decisions, with discount carrying the most weight. Specifically, participants accepted more plea offers in higher relative to lower discount conditions and when potential trial sentence was 5 years rather than 25 years. The pattern of effects was similar for participants in guilty and innocent conditions. Implications Our results run somewhat counter to conventional wisdom on how discount and potential trial sentence affect plea decisions and suggest that, given similar discounts, the likelihood for pleading guilty may be higher for defendants facing less serious charges that carry less severe sentences. We discuss the policy and research implications of these data.

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“…Using archival data in New York State, Yan and Bushway () estimated the average discount to be 67% for individuals who pleaded guilty to felonies and were facing prison. Interviews with youth and adults who pleaded guilty to felonies in New York City revealed steeper discounts – 98% and 77%, respectively (Zottoli et al, ). Against this backdrop, self‐reported false guilty plea rates range from 20% to 40% (Malloy et al, ; Redlich et al, ; Zottoli et al, ) and, to date, 20% of documented US exonerations involved defendants who pleaded guilty (National Registry of Exonerations, n.d.).…”

Section: Areas Of Inquirymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Psychologists have become increasingly interested in examining the influence of various system‐level (e.g., penalty differentials; access to evidence; mandatory sentencing schemes) and defendant‐level (e.g., gender; race; factual innocence) factors on plea decision‐making and outcomes. Although this research is still in its early stages, we are beginning to understand the decision‐making of defendants and prosecutors (Bushway, Redlich, & Norris, ; Kramer, Wolbransky, & Heilbrun, ) and the contexts in which plea decisions are made (Zottoli, Daftary‐Kapur, Winters, & Hogan, ). Studies have revealed aspects of the plea process that may undermine defendant autonomy (Edkins & Dervan, ) and have identified potential outcome disparities for vulnerable groups (Daftary‐Kapur & Zottoli, ; Edkins, ; Kutateladze, Andiloro, Johnson, & Spohn, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

State of the States: A survey of statutory law, regulations and court rules pertaining to guilty pleas across the United States

Zottoli

Daftary‐Kapur

Edkins

et al. 2019

Behavioral Sci & The Law

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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.

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Plea discounts, time pressures, and false-guilty pleas in youth and adults who pleaded guilty to felonies in New York City.

Cited by 55 publications

References 41 publications

Plea Bargaining and the Miscarriage of Justice

Plea Bargaining and the Miscarriage of Justice

Disentangling the effects of plea discount and potential trial sentence on decisions to plead guilty

State of the States: A survey of statutory law, regulations and court rules pertaining to guilty pleas across the United States

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