Analysis Of Plea Bargaining And New Issues In The United States

American plea bargaining institution has been a model worldwide of the so-callednonadversial jury trial. Many countries adopted the valuable parts of the model andgradually developed into their own institution. China also tried to seek someexperience from the plea bargaining, focusing on the successful design as well asflaws seen during these years’ legal practice of the plea in the U.S..Four cases reveal the problem of false plea convictions of the innocents in pleabargaining, which results from a lack of protection of rights of indigent defenders,pressure stressed by judges and state attorneys, irresponsible defense lawyers,undervalued victims and malfunction of the jury.The direct reason lies in the policy choice preferring to control crimes by theauthority after the911event. The deep reason of the false plea convictions of theinnocent lies in factors as follows: the supreme court stands for the idea that the pleaconvictions which the innocent choose to join should be seemed as voluntary andeffective; the jury is inclined to convict a defendant under the influence of theprosecutors; the defense lawyer discounts the probable legal help offered to theindigents; the innocent will have moral confusion to make false plea convictions.Solutions given to deal with the above problems are as follows: more financialsupport to the public defense lawyer and specific public defense lawyer office shouldbe set up to appoint lawyers independently; measures should be taken to supervise themisconduct of prosecutors in regards to their evident negligence to the evidence infavor of the defendant; trial procedures can be simplified to save time to proceed; theAlford plea is now seemed as a solution to the moral confusion of the innocentdefendant who pleaded guilty, which is still unsettled in arguments; last but not least,alternative methods of plea bargaining should be searched for, such as cases trialed infront of a single judge as the practice in Philadelphia.Analysis of the dysfunction can be treated as a warning if China is to learn fromthe plea bargaining system.