Pre-trial detention and guilty pleas: Inducement or coercion?

Euvrard, Elsa; Leclerc, Chloé

doi:10.1177/1462474516670153

Cited by 31 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 18 publications

(40 reference statements)

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“…Although the accused in this profile mention similar pressures, we also found pressures that were cited only in a limited number of cases but greatly affected decision making and accused individuals’ impressions of having been coerced to plead guilty. The financial cost of going to trial was an important constraint for Theresa and Jean, and pretrial detention or having to do “dead time 10 ” was also brought up by some of the accused (see Euvrard and Leclerc 2017).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The practice of overcharging is defined as charging the accused with every charge that is legally possible, even when it is evident that conviction on some of the counts is unlikely or unnecessary. This practice has been documented in Canada by Klein (1976) and Ericson and Baranek (1982), but a recent study (Euvrard & Leclerc 2015) confirms that it is still used by some Crown attorneys to increase their bargaining power during negotiations.…”

mentioning

confidence: 83%

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Pleading Guilty: A Voluntary or Coerced Decision?

Leclerc¹,

Euvrard²

2019

Can. j. law soc.

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The empirical literature on plea decisions shows that rational motives and coercion may coexist, but there is uncertainty with regard to whether accused feel that their decision is voluntary or made under considerable pressure. However, in most jurisdictions, the legitimacy of the plea bargaining process rests on the Court’s obligation to ensure that the guilty plea is entered voluntarily and knowingly. This study proposes to understand how the accused interpret the rational or coercive elements of their decision-making process and the extent to which their decision to plead guilty is voluntary. Based on semi-structured interviews with twenty convicted individuals, we describe the different decision-making processes, from free and informed decisions to forced decisions to plead guilty while innocent.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 83%

Pleading Guilty: A Voluntary or Coerced Decision?

Leclerc¹,

Euvrard²

2019

Can. j. law soc.

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“…The desire to avoid this potential loss of employment and economic hardship, along with the inability to pay bail, often triggers guilty pleas (Rabinowitz ; Natapoff ; Pelvin ), and numerous studies have found that pretrial detention negatively affects case outcomes (for recent reviews, see Jones ; Schlesinger ; Lee ; Stevenson ; Menefee ; Dobbie, Goldin, and Yang ). Pretrial detainees plead guilty more quickly (Sacks and Ackerman ), accepting less advantageous plea deals compared to those arising from lengthier plea negotiations (Kellough and Wortley ; Cheng ; Euvrard and Leclerc ). These effects may be especially pronounced in lower‐level cases because the procedural costs of fighting the charges often outweigh any formal sanctions a defendant might receive if convicted, leading many misdemeanants to plead guilty to get out of jail (Feeley ; Heaton, Mayson, and Stevenson ; Kohler‐Hausmann ; Petersen , ).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is the Process the Only Punishment?: Racial–Ethnic Disparities in Lower‐Level Courts

Petersen

Omori

2020

Law & Policy

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Although misdemeanors make up the bulk of criminal cases in the United States, the majority of research on court decision-making examines felony sentencing. In contrast to felony courts, lower-level courts are characterized by higher case volumes and increased reliance on informal sanctions, which may contribute to greater racial-ethnic disparities. To assess this possibility, we examine pretrial detention and case processing outcomes for misdemeanants in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Utilizing temporal (detention time) and monetary (bond amount) measures of pretrial detention, we assess whether and to what extent there are racial-ethnic disparities in formal and informal sanctions facing misdemeanants. Results indicate that black defendants, especially black Latinx defendants, face greater informal sanctions (longer detention and higher bond amounts), are more likely to be convicted, and experience more severe formal sanctions than do white non-Latinx defendants. These findings complicate Feeley's (1979) argument about lower-level cases, revealing that black defendants are punished by both the court process and formal sanctions. In this way, "the process is the punishment" for lower-level white and nonwhite defendants, while the punishment is also the punishment for black defendants.Racial and ethnic inequalities in US incarceration rates have dramatically risen over the past several decades, and as a result, black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men (Sentencing Project 2017). Although much attention has been devoted to the causes and consequences of racialized mass incarceration in the US, relatively less attention has been given to the larger, and perhaps less visible, forms of criminal justice social control in lower-level courts (Murakawa and Beckett 2010;Kohler-Hausmann 2018). Due to the expansion of broken windows policing and other lower-level law enforcement strategies, the misdemeanor arrest rate has increased threefold in recent decades (Murakawa and Beckett 2010; Lum and Vovak 2018). 1 While a large proportion of misdemeanants are people of color (Kohler-Hausmann 2018), and racial-ethnic disparities in lower-level proactive policing strategies have been well documented (Fagan et al. 2016), few studies have examined racial-ethnic inequalities in lower-level court processing.This gap in the literature has important implications for our understandings of racialethnic disparities in case processing more broadly. Misdemeanors and other lower-level cases differ from felonies in several ways, being characterized by higher caseloads, We would like to thank the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and its Greater Miami Chapter. We would also like to thank our research assistants on the project:

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“…The specification of Z and X parameters in Y 1 and Y 2, respectively, refers to exogenous variables and excludes variables over which defendants or prosecutors exercise control. For example, although detention and bail status may influence defendants' decisions on plea bargaining (Euvrard and Leclerc 2017;Kellough and Wortley 2002), such variables are just as endogenous as plea bargaining itself. It would only be legitimate to include detention status in Z if its latent variable is independent of y 2 , i.e.…”

Section: Appendix 3: Pre-trial Detention and Other Endogenous Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plea Bargaining and the Miscarriage of Justice

2019

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Objectives We examine whether, on average, plea bargaining encourages guilty pleas among defendants who are factually innocent. Methods We develop a formal theory of plea bargaining in which defendants take into account the possibility of false convictions or acquittals when making plea-bargain decisions. We use an incidentally truncated bivariate probit model to test the theory, which predicts that if innocent defendants plead guilty, the correlation (ρ) between the unobserved heterogeneity regarding selection into trial and regarding conviction at trial should be sufficiently positive. The method does not require knowledge of whether individual defendants are factually guilty or innocent. Since ρ is also predicted to vary directly with the unobserved toughness of prosecutors, we develop a decomposition theorem to distinguish between the effects of defendants and prosecutors in plea bargain decisions. Results Using data on 2012 criminal cases decided in Israeli courts from 2010 to 2011, we find that ρ is large and positive. Hence, defendants who did not plea bargain were positively selected in terms of conviction. This means that defendants who accepted plea bargains had smaller counterfactual conviction probabilities than observationally similar defendants who went to trial. ConclusionsThe results indicate that, on average, factually innocent defendants in Israel during this period took plea bargains instead of going to trial. This contradicts "innocence effect" theory, which predicts that factually innocent defendants, on average, reject plea bargains. Our findings are important for research on shadow trial theory, since they show that selection into plea bargains cannot be ignored when inferring counterfactual trial outcomes for plea bargainers.

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Pre-trial detention and guilty pleas: Inducement or coercion?

Cited by 31 publications

References 18 publications

Pleading Guilty: A Voluntary or Coerced Decision?

Pleading Guilty: A Voluntary or Coerced Decision?

Is the Process the Only Punishment?: Racial–Ethnic Disparities in Lower‐Level Courts

Plea Bargaining and the Miscarriage of Justice

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