Plea Bargaining and the Substantive and Procedural Goals of Criminal Justice: From Retribution and Adversarialism To Preventive Justice And Hybrid-Inquisitorialism
Year: 2015

Plea bargaining and guilty pleas are intrinsically incompatible with themost commonly-accepted substantive and procedural premises of American criminal justice: Plea bargaining routinely results in punishment disproportionate to desert, and guilty pleas are an insult to procedural due process. This Article argues that the only way to align plea bargaining with our criminal justice premises is to change those premises. It imagines a system in which retribution is no longer the lodestar of punishm