Punishment Without Trial
Why Plea Bargaining is a Bad Deal
$48.38
- Hardcover
288 pages
- Release Date
13 January 2022
Summary
When Americans think of the criminal justice system, the image that pops into their minds is a trial. They envision a standard courtroom scene with a defendant, attorneys, a judge, and most importantly, a jury. It’s a fair assumption. The right to a trial by jury is enshrined in both the Constitution (Article III, Section 2) and the Bill of Rights (the Sixth Amendment). It’s supposed to be an inalienable right that undergirds our entire justice system.
But in Punishment Without Tri…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781419750298 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1419750291 |
| Author: | Carissa Byrne Hessick |
| Publisher: | Abrams |
| Imprint: | Abrams Press |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 288 |
| Release Date: | 13 January 2022 |
| Weight: | 300g |
| Dimensions: | 152mm x 229mm |
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Critics Review
Anyone interested in criminal justice reform needs to understand plea bargaining because it is responsible for so much of what is wrong with how criminal law is administered in America. Carissa Byrne Hessick carefully and objectively analyzes all of plea bargaining’s shortcomings and offers realistic solutions to curb its abuses. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to tackle mass incarceration, by one of the country’s most thoughtful scholars. – Rachel E. Barkow * author of Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration *
With sound logic, empirical evidence, and appeals to our sense of justice, Carissa Hessick makes an urgent case to fix a problem unknown to much of the public. Plea bargaining may seem innocuous enough, particularly when it’s used in individual cases. But the practice has become so pervasive that most prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys can’t imagine the system functioning without it. In calm, thorough, and authoritative prose, Hessick explains how this dependence on adjudicating cases without trial corrupts the core values we associate with a fair justice system. With illustrative anecdotes backed by hard data, Hessick explains how overreliance on the plea bargain has chipped away at the presumption of innocence, punishes those who exercise their constitutional right
to a fair trial, and obscures prosecutor and police misconduct.
Carissa Byrne Hessick
Carissa Byrne Hessick is the Ransdell Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she also serves as the director of the Prosecutors and Politics Project. Before joining the faculty at UNC, she taught at the law schools of Arizona State, Harvard, and the University of Utah. Her work on the criminal justice system has been published by the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, and numerous academic journals. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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