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50 Crim. L.Q. 67 (2005)
Plea Bargaining as Coercion: The Trial Penalty and Plea Bargaining Reform

handle is hein.journals/clwqrty50 and id is 83 raw text is: Plea Bargaining as Coercion: The Trial Penalty and Plea Bargaining Reform Candace McCoy* If great minds think alike, Joseph Di Luca and I must be brilliant. As I read the anchor article for this volume, Expedient McJustice or Principled Alternative Dispute Resolution?,' my eyes slowly widened because the article's organization and Di Luca's argu- ment about plea bargaining were exactly the same as the outline I had prepared for writing the article you are reading now - except mine will cover plea bargaining in the United States, not Canada. Our policy prescriptions are similar, too, though for different reasons. Perhaps we are naive dreamers, and the aphorism that might apply better refers not to great minds, but to uninformed ones: Ignorance is bliss. Perhaps the pressures of politics and administration make plea bargaining (with a trial penalty attached) an inevitable development in contemporary common law courts. Certainly that has been the hard-headed argument in the United States for decades. Mr. Di Luca does not buy this argument, and neither do I. Our articles differ only because we are describing different nations. I will follow the same organization of points that Expedient McJustice does, drawing from scholarship and judicial pronouncements from the United States instead of Canada. My purpose here is to review the history of plea bargaining in the United States, critique its current manifestations, and show * Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, United States. J.D. University of Cincinnati; Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley. Dr. McCoy is a member of the bar of the state of Ohio and the federal bar of the Sixth Circuit. Before beginning a career in teaching and research, she served as a research associate with the United States Sentencing Commission from 1987-1989. 1. Supra, this issue, at p. 14.