浅析刑事和解理念对辩诉交易制度的启示——以被害人为视角

辩诉交易制度与刑事和解制度是欧美刑事案件中适用的两类重要的司法制度。两种制度有其相似的地方,也有诸多的不同。其中一点便是刑事诉讼的被害人在两种制度中的地位和作用有着较大的差别。而两者的共同基础———社会契约理论和私法中契约自由的观念,以及辩诉交易制度在实际运作过程中可能出现的问题使得辩诉交易借鉴刑事和解的理念,加强被害人的地位和作用成为可能和必要。     

Abolition of plea bargaining in the coast guard

In the administration of criminal justice, the abolition or restriction of plea bargaining has raised many issues. Of primary concern is the impact on court systems and case dispositions. This research note looks at the Coast Guard military justice system and its 1975 decision to abolish pretrial agreements, effectively eliminating plea bargaining in that system. Studying criminal cases from 1973 to 1978, we determine if that intervention in a time series exhibits any potency. Specifically, what difference did the abolition of plea bargaining make? We find that the abolition of plea bargaining did not make much of a difference to the Coast Guard military justice system, similar to the conclusions drawn from studies of civilian courts.     

确立中国式辩诉交易程序之研讨

随着社会、经济的发展,犯罪率不断上升,刑事案件越来越多。由于各种条件的限制,导致了刑事积案与日俱增。为了及时处理积案和集中力量查处大案,美、德、意等国家的法律规定了辩诉交易程序。我们应从中国国情出发,本着“洋为中用”原则,对国外辩诉交易的发展、辩诉交易与简易程序的关系进行研究,确立中国式辩诉交易程序。     

德国辩诉交易的实践与启示

在德国,辩诉交易制度完全是实践中自发的产物。德国辩诉交易实践的形态、产生、争论及相关司法判决和改革草案的分析表明,辩诉交易已经成为德国解决刑事案件的方式之一,这种方式的出现回应了德国刑事诉讼的特点及其面临的困境,同时也缩小了两大诉讼模式的差距,呈现了世界范围内体系差异而解决方式一致的诉讼规律。德国辩诉交易实践表明,在我国建立基于被告人认罪而迅速结案继而获得刑罚减轻的结案方式成为可能。     

如何看待被告人有罪答辩——辩诉交易的一点启示

美国辩诉交易制度中的合理因素 ,可以为我国刑事司法实践中正确等待被告人有答辩提供借鉴。应当更新诉讼理念 ,将认罪答辩视为被告人作为诉讼主体对刑事程序运作方式的一种选择 ,建立激励被告人自愿作出有罪答辩的机制 ,对此类案件可简化诉讼程序 ,同时应建立对被告人有罪答辩自愿性明智性的审查机制。     

Capacity as Philosophy: A Review of Richard Lippke’s, The Ethics of Plea Bargaining

Plea bargaining is a response to capacity overload in the criminal justice system. It both preserves and belies the right to trial, making possible its glorious display but only by denying it in most cases. While plea bargaining has been documented and analysed copiously in historical, sociological and legal terms, its ethical status as an institutional practice are hazy. Richard Lippke offers an account of plea bargaining that draws on the normative debates over responsibility, culpability and desert, in aid of a holistic proposal for a morally defensible system of pre-trial adjudication. In proposing an ethical system of plea bargaining, and working through the normative challenges to this, two bigger questions become visible. These are: what are the implications of developing, in essence, an ethics of efficiency, and, how should the criminal justice system be held to account for the inequalities (and iniquities) that exist before and outside it? In this review essay, I show how these questions are constructed in the book and make some attempt at analysing them, thus engaging with the more urgent and general issue of the complicated relationship of the ideal to the real when it comes to penal practice.     

辩护律师有效辩护的评价及其实现

审判中心主义是一个刑事诉讼程序内的话语,在该话语体系中,犯罪嫌疑人、被告人的辩护权有效行使是庭审实质化不可缺失的构成要素。我国《刑事诉讼法》第37条的规定是有效辩护的评价标准。评价主体是当事人和法律职业者。辩护律师有效辩护的评价标准,是律师诉讼程序的过程标准,而不是以案件的司法裁判结果为标准。可视性的辩护律师有效辩护的实现方式,是改革现行法庭审判程序的简单化运作模式,改革刑事判决书、裁定书对辩护律师辩护观点的评述,扩大庭审网络同步直播的案件范围,许可被告人以律师辩护无效为由提起上诉,许可辩护律师将未决案件争议点诉诸于公共领域,接受当事人和社会民众的检视。     

Plea bargaining and deterrence: An institutional approach

Previous economic analyses of plea bargaining have largely ignored its impact on the deterrence of crime. Instead, they have focused on the bargaining between a defendant and a prosecutor once a crime has been committed. This article remedies this deficiency by asking how the practice of plea bargaining influences the determination of criminal punishment and thereby the supply of crime by rational offenders. The key question examined is, how do the ex post objectives of prosecutors affect the ability of legislatures to implement criminal punishments aimed at achieving optimal deterrence? Various prosecutorial objectives are considered in answering this question.     

Incorporating Co-offending in Sentencing Models: An Analysis of Fines Imposed on Antitrust Offenders

Analyses of sentencing (and other criminal justice processes such as the decision to prosecute, plea bargaining, and contact with the police) often use the isolated individual as the unit of analysis. However, the criminal justice system often processes either offenses or court cases rather than persons. If court cases always involved one individual, this would have little impact. However, offenses involving co-offending—two or more persons acting together—comprise a substantial proportion of criminal activity (Reiss, 1980, 1986). Depending on the prevalence of co-offending, it may be very likely that two or more individuals involved in the same case will be selected as members of the same sample of criminal justice or criminological data. Unless it can be shown that both the individual-level variables of co-offenders and their error terms are mutually independent, analyses based on methods such as ordinary least-squares multiple regression would violate the underlying assumptions of such models. However, alternatives to linear models assuming either type of independence are available. Among the most useful of these are mixed models, specifically those assuming compound symmetry. This is illustrated with an analysis of fines imposed on criminally convicted antitrust offenders. These models may yield results which are substantially different than those from models which ignore co-offending. In a model of fines imposed on antitrust offenders, models which ignore co-offending generally overstate both estimates and statistical significance of offense-level variables and understate those of offender-level variables.     

Calling Your Bluff: How Prosecutors and Defense Attorneys Adapt Plea Bargaining Strategies to Increased Formalization

This ethnographic work examines the inner workings of a highly formalized plea bargaining unit in a large urban prosecutor’s office from the lawyers’ point of view. Observations of forty two plea negotiations between prosecutors and defense attorneys along with both formal and informal interviews reveal how the legal actors adapt to institutional rules in the pursuit of the both efficiency and justice. In the face of ever increasing prosecutorial power, defense attorneys find ways to equalize the balance when cases do not fit the “normal crimes” model. Examination of negotiating strategy and discourse give further insight into whether prosecutors and defense attorneys behave differently under highly rationalized systems of plea‐bargaining compared with traditional models previously studied.     

Are lawyers neurotic?

This paper reports on an ethnographic exploration of the lawyer–client relationship focusing on the attitudes held by legally aided lawyers to their criminal clients. The study combines formal interviews with participant observation in a mixed methodology approach designed to give voice to the lawyers taking part as well as allow the researcher to provide their own perspective. The research produced two quite contradictory viewpoints as lawyers claimed to hold positive attitudes of their clients in interview while presenting negative attitudes under observation. To reconcile this difference, the author suggests considering psychoanalytic literature on self-image, which can be applied to show that the lawyers may have been displaying signs of Freudian defence mechanisms and, ultimately, presented as neurotic in their practise.     

ADVERSARIAL AND NONADVERSARIAL JUSTICE: A COMPARISON OF GUILTY PLEAS AND TRIALS*

Despite the frequency of guilty pleas, researchers disagree about the ability of plea bargaining to provide justice. Critics argue that plea bargaining deprives defendants of due process rights and procedural safeguards Proponents argue that guilty pleas save resources for cases that require trial and allow officials flexibility to tailor justice to individual defendants. This article explores these issues by examining the effect of defendant and case characteristics on sentence severity for 3,269 male robbery and burglary defendants who either pled guilty or were tried in six U.S. jurisdictions, three of which had recently attempted to eliminate or greatly reduce plea bargaining and three with few restrictions on plea bargaining. The results confirm some criticisms of plea bargaining, but refute others. More criminally experienced defendants and defendants who pled guilty at the earliest opportunity did not receive sentencing leniency. Moreover, to a large extent, the same variables predict sentence severity for guilty pleas and trials. In contrast, the results show that defendants convicted at trial received more severe sanctions than defendants who pled guilty, controlling for case severity, evidence, and offender characteristics The results also suggest that the jurisdictions which attempted to control plea bargaining through more centralized control of assistance succeeded in tightening the fit between case characteristics and sentences for both cases adjudicated by guilty plea and trial.     

A historical sketch of plea bargaining

Plea bargaining is one of the most emotional and controversial topics in the field of criminal justice. Not only is it defined and documented poorly, its origins also are much disputed. Pro-plea bargainers like to trace plea bargaining to Cain and Abel's classic struggle. Anti-plea bargainers cite the post-American Civil War era as the beginning point for plea negotiation. The truth lies somewhere in between. This paper investigates primary and secondary sources from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries in an effort to pin down the specific initiation of plea bargaining and its antecedents. This work demonstrates that prejudice has distorted the study of plea bargaining's origin and encourages further research in this area.     

The effects of beliefs and information about hypnosis on the legal defence of automatism through hypnosis

Abstract

The aims of this study were to assess the impact of public conceptions about the nature and coercive powers of hypnosis, and information regarding different approaches to hypnosis, on the plea of automatism through hypnosis in a criminal trial. Subjects were assigned to three groups. Two were presented with criminal cases in which automatism through hypnosis was implicated, as well as duress; one of these groups received information about different approaches to hypnosis. The third received the same cases, but with duress alone. Results showed that, when automatism through hypnosis was implicated as well as duress, the defendant offering the plea was judged less responsible, however, he was not judged less guilty than when duress alone was the defence. Also, subjects presented with the plea of automatism tended to be more sceptical about the idea than those not presented with this plea. The provision of information on different approaches to hypnosis was largely ineffective in altering beliefs and judgments. Judgments of guilt and responsibility were, however, strongly influenced by beliefs about automatism through hypnosis.     

辩诉交易与普通程序简易审的比较与反思

我国理论界和实务界在2002年至2006年前后对辩诉交易问题进行了极为少见的热烈讨论,并随后建立了普通程序简易审制度。我们收集了辩诉交易的许多材料但是并没有理解辩诉交易的实质,因而导致我们普通程序简易审制度仅仅表现了程序的简化却忽视了权利保护等程序正当化问题。我们必须认识到推动我国普通刑事审判程序正当化改革的难度。不能仅仅只是在制度之间进行极端性的跳跃式选择,必须沿着现有的传统渐进改革,不断推动程序正当化。     

The Way in Which Fee Reductions Influence Legal Aid Criminal Defence Lawyer Work: Insights from a Qualitative Study

This article examines how fee reductions influence criminal defence lawyers’ work. Data from 29 qualitative interviews with English defence solicitors and barristers are analysed in order to understand the way in which cuts to fees paid by government for criminal legal aid work can operate to influence criminal defence lawyers’ working practices. I use game theory and Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and field to build a theoretical construct illustrating the invidious position current financial conditions place criminal legal aid lawyers in. I argue that these conditions reward and encourage perceived poor practices and values to thrive at the expense of other concerns – such as the conviction of the guilty, acquittal of the innocent, fair treatment of both victims and defendants, and value for the taxpayer. Ultimately, I argue that criminal legal aid lawyers are set up to fail by the current financial conditions within which they must work.     

“辩诉交易”纵横论

诉辩交易产生于上世纪二三十年代的美国。采取辩诉交易可以使被害人因犯罪行为而遭受的损失早日得到补偿,也有利于修复被犯罪行为破坏的和谐关系。当然辩诉交易也有局限性,有时不利于查明案件事实真相,也有可能损害被害人的利益,也有可能有悖司法公正。尽管我国目前不存在引进美国式辩诉交易的环境,但这并非是说我国不能借鉴于辩诉交易,扬长避短一样可以为司法实践服务。     

No Job Too Small: Justice Without Bargaining in the lower Criminal Courts

Plea bargaining and other informal disposition devices dominate case processing in the lower criminal courts. Consistently, studies have found such courts characterized by assembly-line procedures, deemphasis or disregard of formal due process rights, and guilty plea rates approaching 100% of all convictions. Caseload pressures, tendencies toward cooperation among courtroom participants and, above all, process costs of litigation that greatly outweigh the stakes in minor cases are widely thought to render informality and high guilty plea rates inevitable.
The study reported here challenges these assumptions. The author finds that in Philadelphia roughly one-fifth of all misdemeanor dispositions and one-half of all determinations of guilt are the result of genuine adversarial trials. He shows that an adversarial trial system need not impose prohibitive resource costs, even when extended to misdemeanor cases involving little likelihood of imprisonment, and that process costs will not deter defendants from invoking formal procedures when the court culture is committed to providing trials. Finally, the author argues that even routine misdemeanor cases benefit from guarantees of fairness and accuracy afforded by trial but unattainable when cases are processed by plea bargaining.     

NEGOTIATION AND PLEA BARGAINING MODELS: An Organizational Perspective

This article assesses the contributions to our understanding of plea bargaining made by economic and decision-theory models of criminal justice decision-making. The author introduces an organizational interpretation of plea bargaining and critiques two of the more prominent attempts at formal modeling of the criminal process. Empirical evidence, gathered by others, is reanalyzed to compare the relative explanatory power of these formal models in determining patterns of choice among negotiative and adversary dispositions in two urban felony jurisdictions. The article concludes with the assertion that economic and decision-theory models present an insightful but essentially distorted view of criminal justice decision-making. An appreciation for contextual factors, emphasized in organization theory, is necessary for grasping the reality of the criminal process and for shaping meaningful reform.