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An interesting historical look at jury trial rights and the rise of pleas

By Douglas A. Berman

I just noticed on SSRN this interesting piece providing a great historical perspective on jury trials and plea agreements.  The article by Elizabeth Dale is titled "People v. Coughlin and Criticisms of the Criminal Jury in Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago," and here is the abstract: The last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century are typically characterized as the era in which the criminal jury trial came to an end.  Although criminal juries did not completely disappear, their role became smaller and smaller across that time frame.  Most studies of this phenomenon attribute that decline to the rise of plea bargains in that same period. Specifically, these studies lead to the conclusion that institutional factors, such as case loads and the political pressure on elected prosecutors to be "tough on crime," made plea bargains an increasingly attractive option for the State...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on March 19, 2009 (boomark / email).