Hi, everybody, welcome back. Despite all the work that the Brady Court
did in laying down ground rules to govern plea bargains in the United States in the
future, the Brady Court never really made the reason for its embrace of plea
bargaining explicit. That was left to the next term of the
court, in the following year, when Chief Justice Burger made that reason explicit
in an opinion in a case called Santobello versus New York.
Chief Justice Burger said plea baargaining is an essential component of
the administration of justice Properly administered, it's to be encouraged.
And here's the crucial sentence. If every criminal charge were subject to
a full scale trial, we would need to multiply by many times the number of
Judges and Court facilities. Berger knew, as everybody did, that the
people were not about to increase by many times, the number of Judges and Court
facilities. And thus, plea bargaining was an
essential component of the administration of justice.
Without it, the system would collapse and there was nothing remotely within the
budgetary bounds of the system as we know it that could come in to replace it.
So, it was essential that the plea bargaining system be preserved, at least
until something better could be devised, if ever.
But that also meant that, it needed to be regulated both so that it worked well and
that it didn't do injustices to the people represented by the prosecution or
to defendants themselves in the bargaining process.
That very case, Santobello versus New York, concerned a man, Rudy Santobello,
who was charged with a series of low-level gambling offenses in Brooklyn.
He'd been through the criminal justice system before and knew how this sort of
thing worked. And so he agreed to plead guilty with the
prosecutor, if the prosecutor himself would agree not to recommend to the judge
at sentencing time, that a prison sentence be imposed.
The felonies that Santobello was charged with carried a prison sentence, but the
sentencing concession was, that the prosecutor would not recommend to the
judge that Santobello be imprisoned. Through no fault of the prosecutors, as
things happen in large bureaucracies, by the time that the case actually came for
the plea to be entered. After the plea agreement had been
reached, the state was represented by a different prosecutor, and this second
prosecutor had apparently not been informed about the bargain that had been
made by the previous prosecutor with Santobello.
And so, when it came time to enter the guilty plea, Santobello pleaded guilty,
expecting that the judge would not sentence him to jail because the
prosecutor wouldn't recommend so. But to Santobello's surprise, the second
prosecutor unaware of what the first prosecutor has promised, cited
Santobello's long record and urged that he'd be given a one year jail term, which
the judge promptly did. Santobello that is expected to be given
one plea bargain sentence, and when the actual plea bargain came to be done, he
was given a different sentence, a higher sentence.
And so, he asked the courts to allow him to withdraw, or as they say, reopen his
guilty plea and have a chance to plead again, in which case, he would presumably
not plead guilty in exchange for the same bargain.
It's the lemons problem that we saw earlier in the course, now in the context
of a plea bargain. If defendants aren't sure that
prosecutors will keep their promises in plea bargaining, then the defendants will
demand lower sentences from the prosecutors before they agree to plead.
Just as in the lemons case. Buyers, knowing that there's uncertainty
about the quality of their used cars, will lower the price that they're willing
to offer for any used car. And here, here, defendants will demand
lower sentences to account for the uncertainty that comes with the sense
that prosecutors might renege on their promise.
And just as in the market for lemons and for creme pops, behavior of this sort,
breaking promises by prosecutors. Threatens the existence of the entire
plea bargaining system. What we might call the market for guilty
pleas. It's possible to see this in terms of the
simple equation that we introduced last time.
Recall that we said, as you look at the top of the slide, that defendants will
plead guilty if the cost to them of the sentence that they'll receive after the
plea bargain, marked SPB. Is smaller than the expected cost that
they face from the prospect of going to trial.
Which is the probability that they'll be convicted multiplied by the consequence
to them if they are convicted. Which is the cost of the trial sentence,
ST. Which we assume is substantially larger
than SPB. But the possibility of a broken promise
makes the expected sentence, associated with an offer SPB grater than SPB.
That is, the possibility that the prosecutor can break his promise makes
any plea bargain itself subject to some uncertainty.
We thought, at least we did before cases like this appeared, that when the
prosecutor offered a particular sentence that was that, and the defendant could
count on receiving that sentence. And so it was easy to compare the costs
of that sentence to the costs of the trial prospect.
But now, with the possibility of broken promises by the prosecution, the
defendant must add an element of uncertainty to any promise that the
prosecutor makes during the plea bargain. And that element of uncertainty, which on
the slide I've represented by adding a small or large depending on the degree of
the uncertainty, component h. To the plea bargain that the prosecutor
says that he or she is going to honor. Then, as you can see from the second
equation. It's quite possible that the uncertainty
will cos-, push the cost of the plea bargain above the expected cost of the
trial prospect. As you can see in the example, the, if
there were no uncertainty, the defendant in this case would accept the plea
bargain. But because there is uncertainty and the
defendant has to add that little kicker, h, to SPB to account for the uncertainty.
It may well be that the plea bargain with the uncertainty is not as good a trial a
prospect for the defendant as going to trial itself.
And that means that bargains that would have been made without the uncertainty
won't be made. And in their stead, costly trials that no
one wanted at all will be undertaken in their place.
So, in order to avoid this result, this threat to the entirety of the plea
bargaining system itself, the court voided Santobello's plea and allowed the
plea to be reopened to protect the larger system.
The vehicle that they had at there disposal to reach this result was the
same due process clause of the 14th amendment that we saw discussed in
Magotha versus United States. Here, that same due process of law clause
was held to require that prosecutors must keep the promises that they make in
bargaining. Because that's a matter of fundamental
fairness. Everybody's supposed to keep the solemn
promises that they make. Especially in situations as important as
this. So, as in the market for lemons, what's
fair and what's efficient are again the same thing.