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.