Professor Carissa Byrne Hessick discusses her book, “Punishment Without Trial,” and how plea bargaining has overtaken the criminal justice system. While our rights to a jury trial, evidence, and confronting our accusers are all written into the Constitution by the Framers, American criminal prosecution relies upon the negotiation, effeciency, and compromise of plea bargaining. As the plea bargain replaces trials, a sense of punishment is instilled at every level of the criminal judicial process. Through excessive bail, minimum sentencing, and charge stacking, prosecutors incentivize guilty pleas over jury trials. The result is that anyone swept up in the criminal justice system is more likely to walk away with a guilty plea than any other outcome. How this system developed and the changes that might fix it round out the discussion.
Carissa Byrne Hessick, Anne Shea Ransdell and William Garland “Buck” Ransdell, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law, University of North Carolina School of Law, is the author of “Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining is a Bad Deal.”
