This Just In: The Cost of Plea Bargains

The Cost of Plea Bargains is a report from the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Plea Bargain Task Force.  The report offers an exhaustive look at the history of plea bargains and lists many issues in the current plea bargain process including coercion, fictitious pleas and inconsistency in the process and results using statistics and a review of decades of scholarship on the topic.  The report concludes with recommendations for changes for the future of the process with the goals of fairness and transparency.