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Plea Bargaining: Enigmas of Coercion, Fairness and Efficiency: Interpreting Fifty Years of Conflicted Research into Its Contemporary Consequences

This article was written in English and translated into Chinese for publication in the only citation-indexed criminology journal in the PRC. It examines the practice of “plea bargaining” which has dominated the U.S. conviction process since the mid-19th century and, post-1990, has exploded globally. No work since a 1979 Special Issue of Law and Society Review has evaluated the literature on the consequences of bargaining. Claims that it boosts fairness and efficiency of the court process find little research support and rest on the ‘shadow of trial’ model which has been contested by scholars of game theory and psychological decision-making.