Prof. Dervan's New WSJ Opinion Piece - Plea Bargaining and the Trial Penalty
I'm pleased to let my readers know that tomorrow morning's Wall Street Journal will include an opinion piece I wrote regarding plea bargaining and the trial penalty. The article is entitled "The Injustice of the Plea-Bargaining System."
Below is the introductory paragraph.
The House Judiciary Committee introduced five bills this year in a bipartisan effort to reform America’s criminal-justice system. With incarceration rates in the U.S. five- to 10-times higher than Western Europe and other democracies, the bills aim to provide sensible reforms such as rewriting mandatory-sentencing statutes. Yet none directly addresses plea-bargaining, a practice that induces too many defendants to plead guilty to avoid what has come to be known as the trial penalty.
The entire piece is available here.
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