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Does It Pay to Plead Guilty? Differential Sentencing and the Functioning of Criminal Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

David Brereton  and
Jonathan D. Casper
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Abstract

Do defendants who plead guilty receive lighter sentences than those with similar charges and attributes who exercise their right to trial? The assertion that they do has long been at the heart of the literature describing and explaining the plea-bargaining process, though it has been questioned in some important work published recently. The existence of sentence differentials is particularly hard to document statistically, because a successfully operating policy of punishing those who go to trial will in fact minimize the number of cases in which the sanction for trial has to be imposed. Examination of data from three California counties, as well as consideration of various theoretical concerns, leads us to argue that sentence differentials are likely to characterize jurisdictions whose disposition patterns are based on inducing most defendants to plead guilty.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , 1982 , pp. 45 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 The Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

*

We wish to thank Milton Heumann and James Eisenstein for their useful comments on a previous draft. This research was supported, in part, by Grant 79-NI-AX-0042 from the National Institute of Justice. All responsibility for the arguments and conclusions rests with the authors.

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