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The Influence Of Prosecutorial Overcharging On Defendant And Defense Attorney Plea Decision Making: Documenting And Debiasing The Anchoring Effect, Stephanie Aurora Cardenas
The Influence Of Prosecutorial Overcharging On Defendant And Defense Attorney Plea Decision Making: Documenting And Debiasing The Anchoring Effect, Stephanie Aurora Cardenas
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Strategic overcharging, a practice that some prosecutors readily employ to threaten defendants with excessively severe sentences, undermines the Sixth Amendment right to trial by coercing defendants to plead guilty rather than face penalties disproportionate to their alleged misconduct. Legal scholars and psychologists have long suggested that strategic overcharging may elicit powerful anchoring effects that bias defendants’, but not attorneys’ evaluations, of the plea offer. The current research sought to examine (a) the extent to which mock defendants and legal professionals were susceptible to the anchoring bias, (b) elucidate the mechanism underlying susceptibility to the anchoring effect in plea contexts, and …