The Supreme Court recently acknowledged the "reality that criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials." Panelists will examine emerging trends in plea bargaining and their implications for our criminal justice system. Professor Klein will discuss the increasing use of Brady, collateral attack, and effective assistance waivers in plea bargaining, and examine the legality and implications of such waivers. Professors Roberts and Wright will present results from a multi-site survey of public defender services, focusing on training of defenders in negotiations skills and on actual negotiation practices and outcomes. Professor Brown will compare guilty plea and discovery practices in the U.S. civilian and military justice systems and in other common-law countries and will assess how broader pre-plea discovery and proactive judicial review of guilty pleas impact judicial resources and prosecutors' needs for confidentiality. Professor Chin will survey the constitutional requirements, court rules and other sources of discovery practice in plea negotiations and consider the relationship between discovery and quality of bargains. Professor Turner will discuss pre-plea discovery practices in several jurisdictions, focusing on the factors that drive prosecutors to provide broader discovery than required and the effect of different disclosure practices on plea bargaining.
Business meeting at program conclusion.