[Download] "Honesty and Opacity in Charge Bargains (Response to Article by Gerard Lunch in This Issue, P. 1399)" by Stanford Law School # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Honesty and Opacity in Charge Bargains (Response to Article by Gerard Lunch in This Issue, P. 1399)
- Author : Stanford Law School
- Release Date : January 01, 2003
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 261 KB
Description
Judge Gerard Lynch has helped legal scholars recognize what observers in the trenches have known for years: American criminal justice systems have become administrative systems mn by executive-branch officials (namely, prosecutors). (1) In these administrative criminal justice systems, judges serve as mere functionaries, only occasionally supervising the determination of guilt, and maintaining a somewhat larger voice at sentencing. We are therefore deeply grateful that Judge Lynch, who knows the centrality of the prosecutor in criminal "adjudication," (2) responded to our Screening/Bargaining Tradeoff hypothesis. (3) For Judge Lynch, the kind of aggressive prosecutorial screening we propose and then explore at work in the New Orleans District Attorney's Office amounts to a "refinement" rather than an "alternative" to the dominant administrative criminal process. (4) He supports "careful screening of cases to eliminate unrealistic charges"; (5) but Judge Lynch parts with the next crucial step of the Screening/Bargaining Tradeoff, which aims to reduce the number of charge bargains (that is, cases settled through reductions of initial charges). He doubts that such restrictions on charge bargains are a good thing. When faced with a choice between an administrative system that stresses screening and suppresses later bargaining, and an administrative system that emphasizes bargaining, Lynch favors the latter.