Guilty Pleas, Sentence Reductions, and Non-punishment of the Innocent

Hoskins, Zachary

Abstract

I presented a previous draft of this paper at a workshop at Worcester College, Oxford, in March 2022. I am grateful for feedback from the participants at that event, and in particular to Antony Duff and Jesper Ryberg for helpful discussion at that event and afterward.

It is standard practice in the United Kingdom, the United States and other common law countries to reduce criminal sentences in response to guilty pleas. Sentence reductions are intended as incentives to guilty defendants to plead guilty as early in the process as possible (see, eg, Sentencing Council 2017). Guilty pleas are thought to be beneficial in various ways: they may help to reduce victims’ suffering, they can save victims and witnesses from having to testify, but the most often cited benefit is that they save time and money that would otherwise be spent on investigations and trials. As US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, ‘criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials’ (Lafler v Cooper 2012), with more than 90 per cent of convictions in both the United Kingdom and the United States obtained via guilty pleas (see Nobles and Schiff 2019: 102). Some have suggested that were all those defendants to carry their cases to trial rather than pleading guilty, the criminal justice system would be in danger of collapse (see, eg, R v Caley and others 2012: 6, per Lord Justice Hughes)....

Citation

Hoskins, Z. (2023). Guilty Pleas, Sentence Reductions, and Non-punishment of the Innocent. In J. V. Roberts, & J. Ryberg (Eds.), Sentencing the Self-Convicted: The Ethics of Pleading Guilty (51-70). Hart Publishing. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781509957460.ch-004

• Online Publication Date: Feb 8, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023
• Deposit Date: Mar 25, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 28, 2023
• Publisher: Hart Publishing
• Pages: 51-70
• Book Title: Sentencing the Self-Convicted: The Ethics of Pleading Guilty
• Chapter Number: 4
• ISBN: 9781509957439; 9781509957446; 9781509957453; 9781509957460
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781509957460.ch-004
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/18913901
• Publisher URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/sentencing-the-selfconvicted-9781509957439/