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Podcast: Cato Event Podcast
Episode: Plea Bargaining: Good Policy or Good Riddance?
Description: Today, more than 95 percent of criminal convictions in the United States are obtained through plea bargains. As the Supreme Court observed in 2012, “criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials.” Compared with jury trials, plea bargains are efficient and inexpensive, and they free up resources that might otherwise be devoted to securing convictions in cases where the defendant’s guilt is not seriously in doubt.But plea bargaining has a dark side as well. Given the imbalance of resources between prosecutors and most defendants, together...