Word: pleas
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...strongest argument for deal making, however, is sheer necessity. Approved of by Congress and the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, plea bargaining has been condoned by the U.S. Supreme Court as "essential." It is widely accepted that without deals between the prosecutor and the accused, time-consuming trials would cause many courts to choke on overcrowded dockets. Chief Justice Warren Burger has said that even a 10% reduction in plea bargaining would double the number of trials...
Increasingly, however, the justification for plea bargaining as a necessary evil is being questioned. Most observers agree that certain overburdened urban jurisdictions would grind to a halt without it. But in two fair-sized cities, Portland, Ore., and New Orleans, district attorneys claim that they have been able to get stiffer sentences without backlogging the court docket by cutting down on plea bargaining. According to New Orleans District Attorney Harry Connick, when he limited plea bargaining, the city's criminal court judges complained that "they would have to spend a lot of time on the bench trying cases...
...scattered jurisdictions around the country, other prosecutors and judges have also tried to reduce deal making. Results are mixed; Boulder, Colo., for instance, reports trouble keeping up with its docket without tradeoffs. And some doubt that district attorneys who grandly announce plea-bargain bans really enforce them. Still, it is difficult to understand why some jurisdictions manage to hold down plea bargaining, while others with comparable case loads bargain almost every time. Critics like Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz argue that bargaining is often born not of necessity but of "laziness"-or of judges competing for the cleanest docket...
...most thoroughgoing-and thoroughly studied-ban on plea bargaining went into effect in Alaska in August 1975. A computer study released by the Alaska Judicial Council this summer found that in its first year, the ban was widely heeded by prosecutors. The result: longer sentences, as some hoped for, but no backlogs in criminal cases, as had been feared. In fact, such cases were disposed of faster after the ban went into effect (although, at the same time, a backlog began to develop in civil cases...
...Alaska keep its courts from being swamped by criminal trials without the supposedly essential practice of plea bargaining? Unlike urban courts already streamlined to cope with heavy case loads, Alaska courts had sufficient slack to absorb more trials. Efficiency techniques instituted 16 months before the ban continued to whittle down court delay. More careful screening out of weak cases also helped. But the main reason Alaska's courts could keep up is that defendants continued to plead guilty in droves. The percentage of accused choosing to exercise their right to trial increased only from 6.7% to 9.6%. Why? "Because...