Safety and Justice Twitter Chat: Plea Bargaining

This week the Safety and Justice Challenge and Vera Institute of Justice released a report on plea bargaining. Notably, it found that a high percentage of criminal cases that result in conviction (97 percent in large urban state courts in 2009, and 90 percent in federal court in 2014) happen through guilty pleas, and more than 90 percent are the result of plea bargaining:

In the Shadows

But there are concerns about plea bargaining’s coercive nature, its role in encouraging the forfeiture of procedural protections, and its role in fueling mass incarceration. MacArthur’s Safety and Justice hosted a Twitter chat on its role in our criminal justice system.

Check out some of the conversation: