Scholars highlight an "innocence problem" as one of plea bargaining’s chief failures. Their concerns, however, are misguided. In fact, many innocent defendants are better off in a world with plea bargaining than one without it. Plea bargaining is not the cause of wrongful punishment. Rather, inaccurate guilty pleas are merely symptomatic of errors at the points of arrest, charge, or trial. Much of the worry over an innocence problem proceeds from misperceptions over (1) the characteristics of typical innocent defendants; (2) the types of cases they generally face; and (3) the level of due process they ordinarily desire. In reality, most innocent defendants are recidivists, because institutional biases select for the arrest and charge of these repeat players. And most cases are petty. In these low-stakes cases, recidivist innocent defendants face high pretrial process costs (particularly if the defendants are detained). But innocent defendants also enjoy low plea prices because prosecutors do not try to maximize sentence length in low-stakes cases. Moreover, defendants possess certain underappreciated bargaining advantages in these cases. In the end, the costs of proceeding to trial often swamp the costs of pleading to lenient bargains. Put differently, many recidivist innocent defendants are punished by process and released by pleas. Thus, plea bargaining is no source of wrongful punishment; rather, it may be a normative good that cuts erroneous punishment short. Accordingly, the system must provide innocent defendants access to plea bargaining. Cur-rent vehicles for rational choice pleas-like no-contest pleas and equivocal pleas-are not up to the task. Instead, the system should reconceive of false pleas as legal fictions and require defense lawyers to advise and assist innocent defendants who wish to enter into plea bargains and mouth dishonest on-the-record words of guilt.
Volume 156 Issue 5 2008 Article