Is Plea Bargaining a Future for Inquisitorial Modes of Trial? Lighting Talk on a Polish Study

• In Event: Lightning Talk: Courts and the Law: Research, Challenges, and Innovations

Abstract

The possibility for defendants to admit their guilt before a court and thereby avoid the need for a fully contested trial is a common feature in criminal justice systems founded on the adversarial tradition. Negotiated guilty pleas remain the predominant means of terminating criminal proceedings in numerous common law countries. By contrast to the common law legal culture, systems derived from the inquisitorial mode of trial, have not historically attached such weight to the defendant's admission of guilt. Adversarial and inquisitorial models of criminal procedure represent two different procedural ideologies. Guilty pleas correspond structurally with the adversarial model, as their importance to the conduct of trial is based on the principle of party autonomy, even at the cost of weakening procedural guarantees for the accused Nevertheless, contemporary European literature on the subject notes the growing convergence of the two main juridical cultures of the Western world. It is legitimate to observe that also the development of consensual modes of criminal trial in Continental jurisdictions is a symptom of the aforementioned convergence. The Talk explores the question whether negotiated justice is the future of civil law systems, using an example of an empirical study of consensual modes in Polish Criminal trial

Author

• Andrzej Lewna, University of Gdansk, Poland