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Pleading Innocents: Laboratory Evidence Of Plea Bargaining's Innocence Problem, Vanessa Edkins, Lucian E. Dervan
Pleading Innocents: Laboratory Evidence Of Plea Bargaining's Innocence Problem, Vanessa Edkins, Lucian E. Dervan
Law Faculty Scholarship
We investigated plea bargaining by making students actually guilty or innocent of a cheating offense and varying the sentence that they would face if found ‘guilty’ by a review board. As hypothesized, guilty students were more likely than innocent students to accept a plea deal (i.e., admit guilt and lose credit; akin to accepting a sentence of probation) (Chi-square=8.63, p<.01) but we did not find an effect of sentence severity. Innocent students, though not as likely to plead as guilty students, showed an overall preference (56% across conditions) for accepting a plea deal. Implications and future directions are discussed.
The Innocent Defendant’S Dilemma: An Innovative Empirical Study Of Plea Bargaining’S Innocence Problem, Lucian E. Dervan, Vanessa Edkins
The Innocent Defendant’S Dilemma: An Innovative Empirical Study Of Plea Bargaining’S Innocence Problem, Lucian E. Dervan, Vanessa Edkins
Law Faculty Scholarship
In 1989, Ada JoAnn Taylor was accused of murder and presented with stark options. If she pleaded guilty, she would be rewarded with a sentence of ten to forty years in prison. If, however, she proceeded to trial and was convicted, she would likely spend the rest of her life behind bars. Over a thousand miles away in Florida and more than twenty years later, a college student was accused of cheating and presented with her own incentives to admit wrongdoing and save the university the time and expense of proceeding before a disciplinary review board. Both women decided the …