Plea Bargaining\u27s Baselines

In this Symposium Article, I examine the Courts unwillingness to take seriously the issue of coercion as it applies to plea bargaining practice. It is not so much that the Court has ignored coercion entirely. Rather, it has framed the inquiry in a legalisticmanner that has made immaterial the kinds of considerations we might think most relevant to the evaluation. The Court has refused to ask qualitative questions about felt pressure, prosecutorial motivation, or the risk or reality of excessive punishment. All that matters is legal permissibility. A prosecutor may compel a defendant to plead guilty as long as she uses only code law to do so. In this way, the Courts coercion baseline is legalisticit is defined by what the prosecutor is legally entitled to pursue. Recently, however, the Court has shifted its constitutional focus away from code law. In a series of right-to-counsel cases, it has redefined prevailing plea bargaining practice as the benchmark. This amounts to an emerging extralegalistic baseline, defined not by code law but rather by the parties efforts to circumvent it. Of course, the Court did not mean to alter coercions landscape and almost certainly will not do so. My intention is to demonstrate only that the doctrinal building blocks are in place for the adoption of a better baselinea proportionality baseline. I defend this alternative extralegalistic baseline and even prescribe a practical methodology for its discovery. And, notably, my preferred approach is not without precedent. The Court has applied analogous extralegalistic baselines to claims of coercion in other constitutional contexts

Punishing the Innocent

Scholars highlight an “innocence problem” as one of plea bargaining’s chief failures. Their concerns, however, are misguided. In fact, many innocent defendants are far better off in a world with plea bargaining than without. Plea bargaining is not the cause of wrongful punishment. Rather, inaccurate guilty pleas are merely symptomatic of errors at the points of arrest, charge, and/or trial. Much of the worry over an innocence problem proceeds from misperceptions over (i) the characteristics of typical innocent defendants, (ii) the types of cases they generally face, and (iii) the level of due process they ordinarily desire. In reality, most innocent defendants are recidivists, because institutional biases select for the arrest and charge of these repeat players. And most cases are petty. In these low-stakes cases, recidivist innocent defendants face high pretrial process costs (particularly if they are detained). But innocent defendants also enjoy low plea prices, because prosecutors ultimately prioritize work avoidance over sentence maximization. Moreover, defendants possess certain underappreciated bargaining advantages in these low-stakes cases. In the end, the costs of proceeding to trial often swamp the costs of pleading to lenient bargains. Put differently, many recidivist innocent defendants are punished by process and released by plea. Thus, plea bargaining is no source of wrongful punishment; rather, it is a normative good that may cut punishment short, and (for the innocent at least) less punishment is a net positive. Accordingly, the system must provide innocent defendants access to plea bargaining. Current vehicles for rational choice pleas—like nocontest pleas and equivocal pleas—are not up to the task. Instead, the system should reconceive of false pleas as legal fictions and require defense lawyers to advise and assist innocent defendants who wish to enter into plea bargains and mouth dishonest on-therecord words of guilt

More than competition: exploring stakeholder identities at a grassroots cause-related sporting event

The purpose of this paper is to (a) explore stakeholder identities of a grassroots cause-related sporting event; and (b) gain a better understanding of how identities are related to stakeholder development, support of the event, and future intentions. We used a mixed methods research design that consisted of two studies: qualitative followed by quantitative. Study 1 explored stakeholder identities and how they are related to stakeholder development and support of the event, and Study 2 examined how future intentions regarding attendance, donations, and sponsor support differ based on levels of stakeholder identity. Sports marketing and non-profit management literature streams as well as identity theory and social capital theory informed our studies. The National Kidney Foundation Surf Festival was selected because it is a grassroots cause-related sporting event with financial success over the last two decades. In addition, a surf contest, an action sport, is a unique sport setting in the nonprofit sector, which offers insight to marketers seeking to target subcultures. The findings of the qualitative study revealed three identities relevant to participants: sport subculture, community, and cause. A framework emerged from the data that illustrated how these identities unite together to generate social capital, which is linked to effective volunteer and sponsorship management. Quantitative analysis through survey data provided further evidence of the impact of identification with a cause-related sport activity on consumer outcomes. Results indicated attendees with high surf-related identity are more likely to attend future Surf Festivals, have higher intentions to donate to the cause, and have higher sponsor purchase intentions compared to those with low self-identity with the sport subculture. The conclusion discusses implications, framing the findings through the intersection of the sports marketing and non-profit sector industries, and provides suggestions for future research.Ye