Professor Dervan Files Amicus Brief with the U.S. Supreme Court Regarding Plea Bargaining and Innocence
I filed my first Amicus Brief with the U.S. Supreme
Court last week. The Brief was filed in support of
the petitioner in the case of Taylor v.
Pima County, Arizona et al. The
petitioner, Louis Taylor, accepted an offer to plead no contest and go home
after spending 42 years behind bars following his wrongful conviction. As Judge Schroeder stated in the lower court,
“He accepted the offer, since his only alternative was to stay in prison and
wait for his petition for collateral relief to wend its way through the courts,
a process that could take years.” It
should come as no surprise that after over four decades the Taylor case should
conclude with a plea. As acknowledged by
the Supreme Court in Lafler v. Cooper
(2012), “[C]riminal justice today is for
the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials.” But this case does not end with Taylor’s
freedom. Unfortunately, the Ninth
Circuit recently ruled that he should now be barred from recovering damages for
the alleged grievous deprivations of civil rights that led to his wrongful
imprisonment in the first place because, as a condition of immediate release,
he did the rational and now commonly accepted thing – he pleaded no contest to
time served.
This is an important
case for the Court to accept to both correct the error in the Ninth Circuit,
but also to correct the unsupported and erroneous assumption about the
reliability of plea bargaining that has permeated case law such as this since the Court approved of plea bargaining in the
1970 case Brady v. United States (1970). As an example, in 1975 in the case of Menna v. New York (1975), the Court
stated, “[A] counseled plea of guilty is an admission of factual guilt so
reliable that, where voluntary and intelligent, it quite validly removes the
issue of factual guilt from the case.”
Recent psychological research, however, starting with my ground breaking
2013 study using the Edkins-Dervan Plea Bargaining Paradigm, has demonstrated
that individuals plead guilty for many reasons, some of which have little or
nothing to do with their actual guilt.
The Taylor case is one such example, where obtaining immediate release
from prison, rather than waiting years for collateral relief, was the
determinative issue. Accepting the
Taylor case for review, therefore, affords the Court an important opportunity
to acknowledge that plea bargaining is not a reliable indicator of actual guilt
and that, as anecdotal cases, empirical evidence, and psychological studies now
demonstrate, innocent defendants plead guilty in our system.
Though plea bargaining
has existed in the shadows of our criminal justice system for well over 100
years and grew to dominance in the twentieth century, we are still learning
much regarding the process by which defendant’s engage in decision-making
within the system. Today, we know that
defendants plead guilty for a variety of reasons, some of which have little or
nothing to do with actual guilt. As the
Court considers the Taylor matter and what the future might hold for plea
bargaining jurisprudence more generally, I believe the Court should ensure that
this and future decisions are not made based on prior erroneous assumptions,
but rather, that the path forward is guided by what we now know about bargained
justice. Through such an informed and
considered process, the Court has the opportunity to prevent an injustice,
reinvigorate the meaningfulness and presumption of innocence, and still allow
for the efficiency and beneficial aspects of bargains.
You can read the entire Brief at
the below link.
Writing the Brief was a great
experience, and I hope the Supreme Court takes action in this important area of
law that has gone unchecked for so long.
Thank you to Belmont University College of Law for supporting me in my
research regarding false pleas and in the filing of this Brief. And thank you to my @BelmontLaw colleague,
Charlie Trost, for serving as my counsel.
#pleabargaining
#bargainedjustice #innocence #criminaljusticereform
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