The Plea Bargaining Blog

In May of 2016, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for Legal Reform held a day-long symposium entitled The Enforcement Maze: Over-Criminalizing American Enterprise .  Here is the description from the NACDL website: "The day-long symposium featured key leaders from industry, academy, law, and policy across the political spectrum. Together they addressed the rise of overcriminalization, the inappropriate criminalizing of civil and regulatory matters, why laws need criminal intent requirements, fundamental flaws with the plea bargaining process, criminal discovery abuses and inadequacies of the grand jury process, as well as the use of certain pressures associated with enforcement against business and corporate individuals. House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte gave the morning keynote address; keynote lunch address was given by former Deputy Attorney General David Ogden; and Senator Orrin Hatch gave closing r...

My colleagues, Dr. Vanessa Edkins and Prof. Andrew Pardieck, and I were pleased to receive a grant from the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership earlier this summer to study plea bargaining in the United States, Japan, and Korea.  As part of that grant, we traveled to Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Seoul last month to meet with our co-investigators in each country and present our existing research regarding plea bargaining at several workshops and conferences.  Our research in the United States, Japan, and Korea over the next year will focus on the decision-making process of defendants when faced with a plea offer, including the impact of sentencing differentials on innocent and guilty defendants.  This research comes at an important historical moment in each country.  In the United States, bipartisan efforts to reform the criminal justice system have begun to focus on the role of plea bargaining.  In Japan, plea bargaining has historically been i...