To Plea or Not to Plea: Evidence from North Carolina

• In Event: Legal Services for the Indigent: Guilty Pleas and Sentencing

Abstract

The decision to accept a plea bargain is one of the highest stakes decisions under uncertainty that an individual can make. It is also an extremely important source of unwarranted disparity in the criminal justice system. This paper undertakes the most detailed empirical study to date of the plea bargain decision. We use a dataset of approximately 375,000 observations from 12 years of court cases across North Carolina. In order to overcome omitted variables bias, we make use of an instrumental variables strategy. As expected, In North Carolina a defendant seeking to minimize their sentence length or chance of incarceration is generally better off accepting a plea. Behind this result, however, we find substantial heterogeneity. Most importantly, we find significant differences between the treatment of black and white defendants, even when addressing unobservable factors. These findings have important implications both for optimal decision-making by defendants and for structure and equity of the criminal justice system.

Authors

• David Abrams, University of Pennsylvania Law School

• Ryan Fackler, University of Pennsylvania