Does defendant race affect the strength of their pleas?

Authors: Christi Metcalfe, University of South Carolina, Ted Chiricos, Florida State University

Goal: The goal of this study is to evaluate the influence that the race of a defendant has on the plea-bargaining process, something that has not been given adequate research attention on behalf of the scholarly community. The need for this evaluation comes at the feet of research findings that implicate the salience of prosecutorial decision-making processes.

Background Information: Prosecutorial decision-making is one of the “black boxes” of criminal justice research, being an integral part of the system but something that is so complicated on the inside that it is hard to empirically evaluate. Previous research has investigated the methods in which prosecutors make decisions with regard to charging individuals; however, there has been a lack of research on the decisions they make regarding plea bargaining.

Research Methodology: This study uses a sample of felony cases to assess the influence that the race of the defendant, and the race and sex of the defendant (to see if there are coordinating effects) has on plea bargaining decisions on behalf of prosecutors. The sample was limited to those individuals who came through the public defender’s office in a county in Florida, which limits these conclusions to only individuals with a public defender. Although a limitation of the research design, this directly applies all findings to those individuals who are theoretically more apt to be taken advantage of by prosecutors due to a stereotypically weaker defense by public defenders who are overworked in terms of their caseload.

Findings: The findings of the article suggest that Black individuals or people of color, and most notably Black males, are both 1) less likely to plea, and 2) more likely to receive a lower value for their plea. Further, the factors that predict whether or not a defendant is going to take a plea or not are drastically different across racial groups.

What does it mean?: The decisions that are made in the charging process have been researched by academics in the past. Findings used to indicate that there were strong discrepancies in terms of racial bias throughout the charging and sentencing decisions handed down by prosecutors and judges in the courtroom. With this came sentencing guidelines in an effort to control the ways and the extents of which individuals could be punished. This did well to control the sentences handed down; however, there was still discrepancies regarding the ways that individuals of different races were charged with crimes. There is a plethora of this research that can be found through a simple Google search. What this article is goes beyond this previously mentioned work to evaluate what happens in the plea bargaining process. Frankly, it was revolutionary, and told us what all of us feared - individuals of color were still being prosecuted differently than other, majority, races. These results have multiple layers that must be taken into account. First, individuals of color (most notably males) are less likely to plea in the first place, and secondly, those who do end up taking a plea bargain receive lesser value for their plea compared to other races. To go on top of that, researchers tried to answer the questions of: what makes someone more likely to take a plea bargain? If these processes were the same for all races, then the exact same predictors would be present for all races. However, this wasn’t the case. Results showed that the predictors for a White defendant and the predictors for a defendant of color were drastically different. All in all, the processes aren’t the same.

Note: This research was conducted in the state of Florida. Theoretically, it could be applied to other states with the support of similar analyses; however, just this article does not mean that it is true everywhere. SC4CJR advocates for equal treatment of all individuals exposed to the criminal justice system.

Link to article: https://www-tandfonline-com.pallas2.tcl.sc.edu/doi/full/10.1080/07418825.2017.1304564

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