Plea Bargaining In The Justice System

Sixteen year old football star Brian Banks was accused of raping a girl in high school. Despite his innocence, in the absence of exculpatory evidence at the time and in fear of a looming 40 year sentence, Brian entered into a plea bargain for a five year jail sentence, eliminating his potential future in professional football. An analysis conducted by the California Innocence Project has revealed that his innocence could have been determined through thorough prosecutorial analysis that accompanies jury trials-- an option that he had bypassed in an effort to curtail potential jail-time. (Deutsch) Today plea bargaining--the same practice Banks used to circumvent trial-- has become the standard for the US Justice System. Amid rising frequency of stories similar to his, this paper brings to question the practice, justification, and necessity of the use of plea bargaining in the United States Justice System.
Plea bargaining is an exception to traditional justice, allowing defendants to preclude trials and some of its associated opportunity costs by pleading guilty in return for a reduced sentence. While “Systematic observations of historical court dockets remain inconclusive as to the exact origin of plea bargaining,” (Vogel) it is clear that it first became widely used in Boston, Massachusetts in the mid 1800s as an efficient way to diminish docket congestion.
It was not, however, justified by the Supreme Court until 1970, where “The Court explicitly acknowledged the ‘mutuality of advantage’ that pleas offer the defendant and the government: the defendant ‘limit[s] the probable penalty’ and can begin to serve his sentence immediately, while the state conserves ‘scarce judicial and prosecutorial resources’ and ‘may more effect...

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...ho must contend with the defense counsel. This right protects the accused from one sided rulings. Palmer illustrates the importance of the adversarial model by saying "Under the adversarial model the accused is more likely to be presumed innocent; the state carries the heavy burden of convincing a judge and jury that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. ..Plea bargaining does not resolve uniformly the details and ambiguities on which an accurate determination of guilt and desert to be punished depend... Plea bargaining also results in sentencing concessions, which undermines the court's responsibility to sentence the defendant. Further, "plea bargaining makes a substantial part of an offender's sentence depend, not upon what he did or his personal characteristics, but upon a tactical decision irrelevant to any proper objective of criminal proceedings."