The Plea Bargaining Blog

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...