Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-gq7q9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-22T11:30:11.542Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Plea Bargaining and its History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Albert W. Alschuler
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

For most of the history of the common law, Anglo-American courts did not encourage guilty pleas but actively discouraged them. Plea bargaining emerged as a significant practice only after the American Civil War, and it generally met with strong disapproval on the part of appellate courts. This practice nevertheless became a dominant method of resolving criminal cases at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, and it attracted significant attention and criticism as a result of crime commission studies in the 1920s. In recent years, American criminal courts have become even more dependent on the guilty plea, but the good press that plea bargaining currently enjoys in legal and social science circles is a very recent development. This article explores changes in guilty plea practices and in attitudes toward the guilty plea from the Middle Ages to the present.

Type
Historical Perspectives
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , Winter 1979 , pp. 211 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This is a somewhat abbreviated version of an article that will appear in 79 Columbia Law Review (1979), presented here so that my conclusions will appear with those of Lawrence Friedman, John Langbein, Mark Haller, and Lynn Mather. I am grateful to the participants in the Special National Workshop on Plea Bargaining and to Arthur H. Travers, Jr., James E. Scarboro, John H. Langbein, Mark Haller, Roger Lane, and Richard L. Abel for valuable assistance in the preparation of this article.

References

ADAMS, Henry, Henry Cabot, LODGE, E., YOUNG and James, LAUGHLIN (1876) Essays in Anglo Saxon Law. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
ALASKA JUDICIAL COUNCIL (1977) Interim Report on the Elimination of Plea Bargaining. Anchorage: Alaska Judicial Council.Google Scholar
ALSCHULER, Albert W. (1968) “The Prosecutor's Role in Plea Bargaining,” 36 University of Chicago Law Review 50.Google Scholar
ALSCHULER, Albert W. (1975a) “The Supreme Court, the Defense Attorney, and the Guilty Plea,” 47 University of Colorado Law Review 1.Google Scholar
ALSCHULER, Albert W. (1975b) “The Defense Attorney's Role in Plea Bargaining,” 84 Yale Law Journal 1179.Google Scholar
AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION. PROJECT ON MINIMUM STANDARDS FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE (1967) Standards Relating to Pleas of Guilty. New York: Institute for Judicial Administration.Google Scholar
AMERICAN LAW INSTITUTE (1934) A Study of the Business of the Federal Courts, Part I. Philadelphia: American Law Institute.Google Scholar
ARCHBOLD, John Frederick (1824) Pleading and Evidence in Criminal Cases (1st American Edition).Google Scholar
AUCKLAND, William (1771) Principles of Penal Law (2d ed.). London.Google Scholar
BAKER, Newman F. (1933) “The Prosecutor—Initiation of Prosecution,” 23 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 770.Google Scholar
BENTHAM, Jeremy (1827) Rationale of Judicial Evidence. London: John Bowring.Google Scholar
BLACKSTONE, William (1765-69) Commentaries on the Laws of England.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
BOND, James (1975) Plea Bargaining and Guilty Pleas. New York: Boardman.Google Scholar
BRESSLER, Fenton S. (1965) Reprieve: A Study of a System. London: Harrap.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
BUFFALO LAW REVIEW (1974) “Comment, The Plea Bargain in Historical Perspective,” 23 Buffalo Law Review 499.Google Scholar
CHITTY, Joseph (1816) Criminal Law. Philadelphia: Isaac Riley.Google Scholar
COCKBURN, James S. (1975) “Early-Modern Assize Records as Historical Evidence,” 5 Journal of the Society of Archivists 215.Google Scholar
COCKBURN, James S. (1978) “Trial By the Book? Fact and Theory in the Criminal Process, 1558-1625,” in Baker, J.H. (ed.) Legal Records and the Historian. London: Royal Historical Society.Google Scholar
COTTU, Charles (1822) On the Administration of Criminal Justice in England. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
CURRIE, Elliott P. (1968) “Crimes without Criminals: Witchcraft and its Control in Renaissance Europe,” 3 Law & Society Review 7.Google Scholar
DASH, Samuel (1951) “Cracks in the Foundation of Criminal Justice,” 46 Illinois Law Review 385.Google Scholar
ENKER, Arnold (1967) “Perspectives on Plea Bargaining,” in President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Criminal Justice, Task Force Report: The Courts. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
ERICKSON, William H. (1973) “The Finality of a Plea of Guilty,” 48 Notre Dame Lawyer 835.Google Scholar
FEELEY, Malcolm (1975) “The Effect of Heavy Caseloads.” Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, California (September 5).Google Scholar
FERDINAND, Theodore N. (1973) “Criminality, the Courts, and the Constabulary in Boston: 1703-1967.” Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
FINKELSTEIN, Michael O. (1975) “A Statistical Analysis of Guilty Plea Practices in the Federal Courts,” 89 Harvard Law Review 293.Google Scholar
FLAHERTY, David H. (1973) “Criminal Justice in Provincial Massachusetts.” Presented at the Conference on Atlantic Society, University of Edinburgh (June 29-July 1).Google Scholar
FOGEL, David (1975) We Are the Living Proof: The Justice Model for Corrections. Cincinnati: W.H. Anderson Co.Google Scholar
FOSDICK, Raymond (1922) “Police Administration” in Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter (eds.) Criminal Justice in Cleveland: Reports of the Administration of Criminal Justice in Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland: Cleveland Foundation.Google Scholar
FULLER, Hugh Nelson (1931) Criminal Justice in Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Institute for Research in the Social Sciences.Google Scholar
GARDNER, A. (1930) Canfield: The True Story of the Greatest Gambler. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
GEORGIA DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WELFARE (1924) “Crime and the Georgia Courts,” 16 Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 169.Google Scholar
HALE, Matthew (1736) 2 The History of the Pleas of the Crown. (Emlyn, S., ed.). London: Nutt; 1st American ed. (1847) Philadelphia: R.H. Small.Google Scholar
HALLER, Mark H. (1970) “Urban Crime and Criminal Justice: The Chicago Case,” 57 Journal of American History 619.Google Scholar
HARNO, Albert J. (1928) “The Workings of the Parole Board and Its Relation to the Courts,” 19 Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, app. at 83.Google Scholar
HEUMANN, Milton (1978) Plea Bargaining: The Experiences of Prosecutors, Judges, and Defense Attorneys. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
HUNNISEIT, R. (1961) The Medieval Coroner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
ILLINOIS ASSOCIATION FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE (1929) The Illinois Crime Survey. Chicago: The Illinois Association for Criminal Justice.Google Scholar
KAPLAN, John (1970) Marihuana: The New Prohibition. New York: World Publishing Company.Google Scholar
KIPNIS, Kenneth (1976) “Criminal Justice and the Negotiated Plea,” 86 Ethics 93.Google Scholar
LANGBEIN, John H. (1974) Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance: England, Germany, France. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LANGBEIN, John H. (1977a) Torture and The Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Regime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LANGBEIN, John H. (1977b) Comparative Criminal Procedure: Germany. St. Paul: West Publishing Company.Google Scholar
LANGBEIN, John H. (1978a) “The Criminal Trial before the Lawyers,” 45 University of Chicago Law Review 263.Google Scholar
LANGBEIN, John H. (1978b) ‘Torture and Plea Bargaining,” 46 University of Chicago Law Review 3.Google Scholar
MC CORMICK, Charles (1954) Evidence. St. Paul: West Publishing Co.Google Scholar
MC LAUGHLIN, Edward J. (1969) “Selected Excerpts from the 1968 Report of the New York State Joint Legislative Committee on Crime, Its Causes, Control, and Effect on Society,” 5 Criminal Law Bulletin 255.Google Scholar
MICHAEL, Jerome and WECHSLER, Herbert (1940) Criminal Law and Its Administration. Chicago: Foundation Press.Google Scholar
MILLER, Justin (1927) “The Compromise of Criminal Cases,” 1 Southern California Law Review 1.Google Scholar
MISSOURI ASSOCIATION FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE, SURVEY COMMITTEE (1926) The Missouri Crime Survey. St. Louis: Missouri Association for Criminal Justice, and New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
MOLEY, Raymond (1928) “The Vanishing Jury,” 2 Southern California Law Review 97.Google Scholar
MOLEY, Raymond (1929) Politics and Criminal Prosecution. New York: Minton, Balch.Google Scholar
NEW YORK STATE CRIME COMMISSION (1927) Report to the Commission of the Sub-Committee on Statistics. New York City: New York State Crime Commission.Google Scholar
PACKER, Herbert (1968) The Limits of the Criminal Sanction. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
POUND, Roscoe (1930) Criminal Justice in America. New York: Henry Holt.Google Scholar
PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON CRIME IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (1966) Report. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON LAW ENFORCEMENT AND ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE (1967) The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
PULTON, Ferdinando (1609) De Pace Regis et Regni. London.Google Scholar
RADZINOWICZ, Leon (1956) 2 A History of English Criminal Law. London: Stevens.Google Scholar
SACKVILLE-WEST, Victoria M. (1936) Saint Joan of Arc. Toronto: Doubleday.Google Scholar
SAN FRANCISCO COMMITTEE ON CRIME (1970) A Report on the Criminal Courts of San Francisco, Part I: The Superior Court Backlog—Consequences and Remedies. San Francisco: San Francisco Committee on Crime.Google Scholar
SKOLNICK, Jerome H. (1966) Justice without Trial. New York: John Wiley.Google Scholar
STAUNDFORDE, W. (1560) Les Plees Del Corone. London.Google Scholar
STEPHEN, Henry (1874) Commentaries on the Laws of England. London.Google Scholar
TRAIN, Arthur (1924) The Prisoner at the Bar (3rd ed.) New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.Google Scholar
U.S. NATIONAL ADVISORY COMMISSION ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE STANDARDS AND GOALS (1973) Courts. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. NATIONAL COMMISSION ON LAW OBSERVANCE AND ENFORCEMENT (1931a) Report on Crime and the Foreign Bom. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. NATIONAL COMMISSION ON LAW OBSERVANCE AND ENFORCEMENT (1931b) Report on Prosecution. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. NATIONAL COMMISSION ON LAW OBSERVANCE AND ENFORCEMENT (1931c) Report on the Enforcement of the Prohibition Laws of the United States. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
VERA INSTITUTE OF JUSTICE (1977) Felony Arrests: Their Prosecution and Disposition in New York City's Courts. New York City: Vera Institute of Justice.Google Scholar
WHARTON, Francis (1912) Evidence in Criminal Issues (10th ed.). Philadelphia: May & Brother.Google Scholar
WILSON, James Q. (1975) Thinking about Crime. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
YALE LAW JOURNAL (1967) “Note, Interrogation in New Haven, The Impact of Miranda,” 76 Yale Law Journal 1519.Google Scholar