Source: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/414/932/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 18:01:10+00:00

Document:
W. J. ESTELLE, Jr., Director, Texas Department of Corrections, et al.
It is well established that 'if the only objective of a state practice is to discourage the assertion of constitutional rights it is 'patently unconstitutional." Chaffin v. Stynchcombe, 412 U.S. 17, 32 n. 20; Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618, 631; United States v. Jackson, 390 U.S. 570, 581.
Such express statutory schemes, however, are not the only mechanism for positing with an accused the necessity of determining whether the risk of greater punishment attending the exercise of constitutional rights makes that exercise too costly. A guilty plea constitutes a waiver of several fundamental rights, among them the right to jury trial. See Santobello v. New York, 404 U.S. 257, 264 ( Douglas, J., concurring). Plea bargaining, the extreme importance of which was recognized in Santobello, leaves with the prosecutor the power to set the price for the exercise of those rights. Machibroda v. United States, 368 U.S. 487, held a guilty plea voidable if induced by the prosecutor's threat to bring additional prosecutions. Yet plea bargaining would be eliminated if an accepted plea to a lesser offense was rendered constitutionally vulnerable by the prosecutor's expressed intent to otherwise proceed to trial on the crime charged.
Despite the magnitude of the constitutional issues and the important role of plea bargaining in the administration of criminal justice (see White, A Proposal for Reform of the Plea Bargaining Process, 119 U.Pa.L. Rev. 439 (1971), and Note, The Unconstitutionality of Plea Bargaining, 83 Harv.L.Rev. 1387 (1970)), this Court has never spelled out the constitutional limits on the practice. This case, in which the accused's right to jury trial was expressly burdened with the possiblity of a mandatory life sentence (possibly the maximum penalty a State may exact for criminal conduct; see Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238) under the habitual offender provisions, provides an opportunity to delimit its permissible bounds. I would take that opportunity.

References: v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v.