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Mandatory Sentencing and the Abolition of Plea Bargaining: The Michigan Felony Firearm Statute

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1979

Milton Heumann  and
Colin Loftin
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Abstract

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Increasing concern about the substantial discretion accorded prosecutors in plea negotiations and judges in sentencing decisions has led to a number of proposals to curtail both. In this paper, we assess the consequences of an attempt, simultaneously, to abolish plea bargaining and introduce mandatory sentencing. The Wayne County (Detroit) Prosecutor prohibited his subordinates from plea bargaining in any case in which a recently enacted state statute warranted a mandatory sentence. This statute imposed an additional two-year prison term if a defendant possessed a firearm while committing a felony. Using qualitative data collected from interviews with judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, and quantitative disposition data for the six-month periods before and after the law went into effect, we describe the effects of the new statute on dispositions in Detroit. Though there is some evidence that the law and the prohibition on plea bargaining may have selectively increased severity of sentences for certain classes of defendants, for the most part disposition patterns did not appear to have been altered dramatically. In many serious cases, sentences for the primary felony were adjusted downward to take into account the additional two-year penalty; in “equity” cases, in which defendants had not previously received prison time, other mechanisms, such as abbreviated bench trials, were often employed to circumvent the mandatory sentencing provision.

Type
Current Empirical Research
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , Winter 1979 , pp. 393 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

The research reported here was supported in part by a grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research of the University of Michigan and Grant 78NI-AX-0021 from the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view or opinions stated are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. We also received financial support from the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Public Policy Studies of the University of Michigan. The research could not have been completed had it not been for the herculean efforts of Janice Hartwell, Arthur Meyers, Tori Fairman, and Mark Vaitkus who did most of the coding. We also wish to acknowledge the enthusiastic cooperation we received from the Office of the Prosecuting Attorney of Wayne County, Michigan. The Prosecutor and his staff were helpful in every respect. Finally, we wish to thank Richard Abel, Jonathan Casper, and James Eisenstein for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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