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Plea Bargaining And Collateral Consequences: An Experimental Analysis, Carlie Malone

Vanderbilt Law Review

The overwhelming majority of convictions in the United States are obtained through guilty pleas. Many of these guilty pleas are a product of plea bargaining, where a defendant enters a guilty plea in exchange for some form of official concessions. Despite its prominence, plea bargaining is subject to limited regulation. One consequence of this limited regulation is that courts generally only require the direct consequences of a guilty plea to be communicated to a defendant. Thus, when a defendant is deciding whether to plead guilty, he is often operating with incomplete information about the costly collateral consequences that may attach …