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Indeed, he holds up the UK's high rates of plea bargaining... I am not sure you read the same paper as anyone else. Nowhere did I see this. In fact, the author

by drucken 14y ago

Indeed, he holds up the UK's high rates of plea bargaining... I am not sure you read the same paper as anyone else. Nowhere did I see this. In fact, the author more or less said the exact opposite on page 215. Also, this paper is dated 1979. Plea negotiation, let alone plea bargaining, is rare in the UK. The UK government only in the last decade began to accept the use of plea bargaining in corporate crime. Occassionally, plea negotiation can also occur, most commonly in co-conspirator cases like gang assaults, but again this is uncommon. To compare the absolutely routine use of plea bargaining in the US to their rarity in the UK would be well beyond a stretch.

azernik 14y ago
I'm not sure what paper you're reading either. Page 210: "Plea bargaining has been documented in Eng- land where crime rates are closer to German than to American levels; the constant factor in both England and the United States is, of course, adversary criminal procedure." All that's talked about on page 215 is that "in contemporary [1979] England, official ideology has been until lately loath to acknowledge the existence of plea bargaining," but that it is in fact well-documented (as an example showing that, if there were an unofficial plea bargaining system in Germany, it would be easy to discover by interviews of legal counsel). I agree that the US is indeed a more extreme case (especially in not limiting plea bargaining to certain types of cases and openly accepting plea bargaining in principle), but this author clearly believes that the causative factor in both cases is the complexity of common law trial procedure (which, again, seems to have reached extremes in the US that are unmatched in the UK).