The Historical and Racial Implications of Plea Bargaining

In the legal system, plea bargaining is utilized as the standard methodology for processing defendants quickly. Due to its efficiency and flexibility, it has been the standard tool for securing convictions for the last 100 years. Due in part to its predominant role in the conviction of lower-class and minority defendants, however, it has also become the target of a great deal of scrutiny in the legal community. Legal dilemmas often arrive wherein laws or policies are enacted with racially neutral justifications, but with a clearly racial orientation. Discussion about these issues most often focuses on the racial motivation of the law's original form, and whether the current justification or form of these laws makes them acceptable, despite their original racial “taint”. In this paper, I will analyze plea bargaining from a racial perspective. In Section I, I will discuss the historical foundations of the use of plea bargaining as common practice, and whether a significant racial motivation existed in its origins. In Section II I will discuss the current state of the racially disparate impact of plea bargaining and its non-racial justifications, including whether any initial 'taint' of racial motivation in the practice's origin have been dealt with by it's current implementation. Finally, I will discuss processing procedures that help relieve the racially disparate impact of plea bargains. I. The History of the Plea Bargain in American Law 1. Guilty Pleas in Western Law Proponents of plea bargaining often claim that the procedure has an extensive history in western law. Opponents of plea bargaining instead claim that it is a recent innovation without legal