Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 Strategic Voting in a Jury Trial with Plea Bargaining
نویسنده
چکیده
We study the criminal court process focusing on the interaction between plea bargaining and jury trials. We model plea bargaining such that a prosecutor makes a takeit-or-leave-it offer and a defendant, who is either guilty or innocent, pleads either guilty or not guilty. If the defendant pleads not guilty, the case goes to a jury trial, which follows a strategic voting model. Plea bargaining produces a bias in which the defendant is less likely to be guilty if the case goes to trial, which in turn alters the jurors’ voting behavior. Conversely, anticipated jury trial outcomes affect a prosecutor and a defendant while they participate in a plea bargain. We find that the equilibrium behavior in a court with plea bargaining and a jury trial, resembles the equilibrium behavior in the separate jury model, though jurors may act as if they echo the prosecutor’s preference against convicting the innocent and acquitting the guilty. We also compare two voting paradigms, unanimity and non-unanimity. The unanimity rule is inferior to nonunanimity because the ex-ante punishment delivered to the innocent or undelivered to the guilty by unanimity rule does not vanish as the size of jury gets large. JEL classification numbers: D72, K41
منابع مشابه
An Experimental Study of Jury Deliberation
We study the e¤ects of deliberation on collective decisions. In a series of experiments, we vary groupspreference distributions (between common and conicting interests) and the institutions by which decisions are reached (simple majority, two-thirds majority, and unanimity). When deliberation is prohibited, di¤erent institutions generate signi cantly di¤erent outcomes, tracking the theoretica...
متن کاملDivision of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 Strategic Voting in Sequential Committees
We consider strategic voting with incomplete information and partially common values in sequential committees. A proposal is considered against the status quo in one committee, and only upon its approval advances for consideration in a second committee. Committee members (i) are privately and imperfectly informed about an unobservable state of nature which is relevant to their payoffs, and (ii)...
متن کاملNber Working Paper Series Experimenting with Measurement Error: Techniques with Applications to the Caltech Cohort Study
Measurement error is ubiquitous in experimental work. It leads to imperfect statistical controls, attenuated estimated effects of elicited behaviors, and biased correlations between characteristics. We develop simple statistical techniques for dealing with experimental measurement error. These techniques are applied to data from the Caltech Cohort Study, which conducts repeated incentivized sur...
متن کامل