Mike McConville

Plea Bargaining and Plea Negotiation in England

Underlying the common law theory of evidence and procedure in criminal cases is an assumption that guilt will be determined by means of a formal adversarial process in which evidence is presented to an impartial jury. It has long been recognized, however, that courts and legal practitioners, in both England and the United States, operate according to a quite different assumption: that the right to be tried by jury will only exceptionally be exercised and that the great majority of cases will be settled by a plea of guilty. The available statistics for both countries show that this latter assumption is well founded. In England, about 85 percent of defendants charged with indictable criminal offenses plead guilty,1 and in the United States it would seem that the proportion is even higher (see, e.g., Newman, 1966; Blumberg, 1967; Presidents Commission, 1967). The recognition of the importance of the guilty plea has led American researchers to devote considerable attention

Trial by Jury: Some Empirical Evidence on Contested Criminal Cases in England

The authors of this article attempt to examine jury performance by collating and comparing views on the jurys verdicts drawn from other participants in the trial. This research is based on a study of jury trials heard in the Crown Court at Birmingham, England, together with additional material drawn from a sample of cases in London. It shows that doubts about both acquittals and convictions by jury were expressed with a surprising frequency. An examination of the remedies available to correct miscarriages of justice demonstrates the ineffectiveness of current appeals procedures. The authors conclude that it is necessary to evaluate the jurys function within a political context.