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Showing posts from December, 2018

Professor Dervan's New Scholarship on the Supreme Court and Plea Bargaining

My new piece, entitled  C lass v. United States: Bargained Justice and a System of Efficiencies , is now available for free download on SSRN.  If you are interested in the state of plea bargaining research, including law and psychology research, and where the Supreme Court might go next, you'll enjoy this new article.  The piece ends with these words: We know today, based on the research described above along with a steadily increasing number of real-world examples, that the incentives to plead guilty can be overpowering—indeed, so overpowering that even innocent defendants will sometimes take this path. When the Court addresses the fundamental question of defendant decisionmaking, it will have to wrestle with this reality and decide how best to proceed with the development of its plea-bargaining jurisprudence. Recall that in Brady, the Court said, “[W]e would have serious doubts about this case if the encouragement of guilty pleas by offers of leniency substantially increa