Should The Practice Of Plea Bargaining Be Eliminated?

Should the Practice of Plea Bargaining be Eliminated?
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Should the Practice of Plea Bargaining be Eliminated?
Most criminal cases are resolved not by trials, but instead using guilty pleas. Those guilty pleas mostly stem from negotiations between the defense and the prosecution. This is known as plea bargaining (Wright & Miller, 2002). Plea bargaining is practiced in many countries around the globe, from New Zealand and Canada to Australia and the United States and many other countries. This paper provides an answer to the question of whether the practice of plea bargaining should be eradicated. The paper argues that this practice should indeed be eliminated because of its numerous weaknesses, which are discussed.
Plea bargaining refers to the informal process through which the defense counsel and the prosecuting authority negotiate the charge upon which the prosecution would proceed, and/or concessions which the prosecution might make as regards sentencing, for instance, the facts upon which sentencing should proceed, in order to reach a mutually acceptable agreement according to which the accused person would plead guilty (Linthorne et al., 2016; Flynn & Freiberg, 2018). The court does not have any formal role in this process. Plea bargaining is recognized in case law (Brook et al., 2016).
This practice should be eliminated because it has many defects and has a negative effect on various facets of the criminal justice system, including the legislative drafting of substantive criminal offenses and the efforts of correctional officials to rehabilitate criminals who have been convicted (Alschuler, 1983). This practice leads attorneys to see themselves not as advocates, but rather as administrators and judges. Plea bargaining also subjects lawyers to serious temptations, including financial temptations, to ignore the interests of their clients (Alschuler, 1983). It also serves to diminish the confidence in client-lawyer relationships that could give purpose and dignity to the legal profession and which is necessary to the defendant’s sense of a just and fair treatment (Alfini & Ryan, 1977).
Additionally, this practice makes a significant part of the sentence of the accused person to not depend upon the offender’s characteristics or what the offender did, but rather it makes it depend upon a tactical decision that is not relevant to any appropriate objective of criminal proceedings (Scott & Stuntz, 1992). In cases that are contested, the practice of plea bargaining replaces a regime of split-the-difference with a judicial determination of innocence or guilt and raises the notion of partial guilt above the condition that criminal responsibility has to be established beyond a reasonable doubt (Alschuler, 1983). Furthermore, various scholars have pointed out that plea bargaining serves to depreciate the purposes of the criminal sanction and the value of human liberty since it treats these things as commodities that can be traded for economic savings; savings that are actually minor when they are measured against common social costs (Verdun-Jones & Tijerino, 2002). In some jurisdictions, defendants who are of certain races, minorities in part...