The Plea Bargaining Blog

The Ohio Supreme had an interesting case in August examining the troubling issue of "Dark Pleas." The case involved Lamont Clark, who was convicted of murder in 1993. In 2015, he filed a motion for a new trial after it was discovered that prosecutors had removed part of a medical record containing exculpatory evidence from the alleged victim in the homicide. Before the courts could hear the motion, however, Clark was offered a plea deal that would result in his immediate release. Clark accepted the deal, in part, because his mother was gravely ill at the time. Seven years later, Clark sought to withdraw his plea on the basis that it was coerced and, therefore, not voluntary as required by law. While the Ohio Supreme Court did not accept jurisdiction in the matter, Justice Donnelly wrote a powerful dissent describing what he called "Dark Pleas" and the manner in which they subvert due-process rights.  From Judge Donnelly's dissenting opinion.  This appeal present...

The Sentencing Matters Substack has an interesting piece by Jonathan Wroblewski discussing and examining a particular plea bargain. The piece, entitled Fair Enough? Truth, Justice, and the Case of Chrystul Kizer , can be found here .  The focus of the article, Chrystul Kizer, was alleged to have shot and killed Randall Volar when she was seventeen years old. According to the piece, Kizer told authorities that Volar had been "sexually abusing and otherwise mistreating her, including by marketing her as a prostitute. She said she shot him as he tried to touch her." After a 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision decided that Kizer could raise an affirmative defense of abuse at trial, the case was resolved through a plea bargain. The bargain resulted in Kizer pleading guilty to one felony count of second-degree reckless homicide. The article explores whether this was a "fair" result, given that the eventual plea did not reflect the facts in the case.  From the author: I...

The Plea Bargaining Institute has posted a report regarding Supreme Court plea bargaining cases from 1970-2019. The report contains summaries of each case, which total 59. Before the summaries, the report contains a lengthy examination of the history of plea bargaining, the 1970 Brady decision, and the Supreme Court period following Brady . From the report's introduction: This report from the Plea Bargaining Institute contains summaries of plea bargaining cases from the U.S. Supreme Court from 1970 until 2019. Each summary contains the case title, date of decision, the court from which review occurred, whether the decision was unanimous, the authoring Justice, the members of the majority, concurrence, and dissent, a brief overview of the case, a more detailed case summary, and a key quotation from the opinion. Before the individual summaries are listed below, the report begins with a brief examination of the historical rise of plea bargaining. This introduction also contains brief...

In a new article authored by Prof. Lucian Dervan, Dr. Vanessa Edkins, and Prof. Thea Johnson, the authors explore the forces that lead to false pleas of guilty through examination of two cases of serial offenders who remained undetected for significant periods of time in part because others were initially coerced into false pleas of guilty in the cases.  Access a free copy of the article here . From the introduction: The last decade has seen significant growth in academic research and literature related to the plea bargaining system. In particular, much research has explored the impact of plea bargaining on the accused, including the phenomena of false guilty pleas by the innocent and false testimony in return for bargains. Both false guilty pleas and false testimony often result from the coercive bargaining practices regularly found in the criminal system. Plea bargaining is coercive when it overbears the will of the defendant, to borrow a phrase from the Supreme Court’s decision ...