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Commentary on Nathan Schaal Wilson and Gabriela Jara's ‘plea bargaining and the legislative response’
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Dornier, Orane (2013) Commentary on Nathan Schaal Wilson and Gabriela Jara's ‘plea bargaining and the legislative response’. Working Paper. Coventry: University of Warwick. Warwick School of Law Research Paper (Number 2013/13).
An open access version can be found in:
Official URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2291407
Abstract
This article offers a commentary, from a comparative perspective, on Nathan Schaal Wilson and Gabriela Jara’s article (in this collection) ‘Plea Bargaining and the Legislative Response’. The authors see the phenomenon of plea bargaining not only as an agreement between the government officials and the accused (or rather counsel for the accused) as the two “parties” to the criminal matter, but as a de facto part of criminal policy. They point to the development of a “feed-back loop” whereby plea bargaining lowers the sentences actually imposed by courts and thereby pushes legislatures toward raising sentence levels. In this system, it is left to prosecutors and their discretionary power to achieve the sentence levels actually desired by the legislature.
This commentary takes a comparative approach in outlining possible solutions for the problems caused by plea bargaining, using a detailed comparative analysis of the German model in particular.
Part I considers the existing and newly implemented rules in German law intended to regulate and limit plea bargaining. Here the question arises whether these are sufficient to keep plea bargaining under control. Part II considers whether German law may even be a source of inspiration for the US system.
Of course the question remains whether legal systems as different as those of Germany and the US can even be compared, and if so, whether solutions can be drawn from such comparison.
Item Type: | Working or Discussion Paper (Working Paper) | ||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Law | ||||
Series Name: | Warwick School of Law Research Paper | ||||
Publisher: | University of Warwick | ||||
Place of Publication: | Coventry | ||||
Official Date: | 9 July 2013 | ||||
Dates: |
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Number: | Number 2013/13 | ||||
Number of Pages: | 16 | ||||
Status: | Not Peer Reviewed | ||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||
Open Access Version: |
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