Research Coordination Network: Understanding Guilty Pleas

Ninety-five percent of all convictions in American courts are the result of guilty pleas, yet very little research is currently conducted on the plea process. This Research Coordination Network (RCN), organized around three cores, will use a set of meetings and papers to create a new interdisciplinary dialogue about plea decision making. The first core, entitled Prosecutorial Decision Making: Modeling the Process that Generates Plea Bargains, will grapple with one of the central puzzles of plea bargaining in the criminal justice context -- what motivates prosecutors and judges. The second core, entitled Defense Decision-Making: Understanding the Defendant's Role, will focus on the perspective of the defendant and the defense attorney. This core will explicitly focus on other factors besides expected punishment that might affect these decisions. The third core, entitled Workgroup Decision Making: Modeling Organizational Influences, will focus on how the courtroom workgroup as a social entity with its own norms and pressures that exists within a political and social context approaches plea bargaining. Across all cores, a special emphasis will be placed on understanding how institutional structures and policy choices affect plea outcomes. Empirical studies focused on institutional features have the potential to create better scientific understanding of plea bargains and lead directly to recommendations for policies that will generate fairer and more efficient sentencing outcomes. The project will start with two steering committee meetings in 2014 to set the agenda for the network and identify key areas of overlap. Small workshops will be held at disciplinary conferences for groups such as the American Society of Criminology, American Psychology-Law Society, and Society of Empirical Legal Studies during 2014 and 2015. Important new research on plea bargaining will be highlighted during interdisciplinary workshops at the University at Albany in 2015 and 2016.