This article documents the diffusion of plea bargaining and other mechanisms to reach
criminal convictions without a trial and argues that their spread implies what this article terms …

Defendants charged with crimes in US courts rarely go to trial. Instead, convicted defendants
typically waive their right to trial and plead guilty, sometimes after bargaining for a reduced …

An inhabited institutions perspective views institutions from the bottom up, as “inhabited” by
individual and organizational actors who have agency, rather than as static, top-down …

For decades, legal commentators sounded the alarm about the tremendous power wielded
by prosecutors. Scholars went so far as to identify uncurbed prosecutorial discretion as the …

False confessions are a contributing factor in almost 30% of DNA exonerations in the United
States. Similar problems have been documented all over the world. We present a novel …

The concept of stigma and labeling has been central to the sociology of punishment since at
least the writings of Durkheim and Mead. However, the vast transformations brought on by …

When I was a prosecutor in the early 2000s, my office deployed a variety of diversion
programs to unload provable, but minor, cases without going through a formal adjudicative …

The jury trial has long been a keystone of the American criminal justice system. Few
defendants exercise their right to trial, however, and those who do tend to receive …

Deterrence describes a process in which perceived risks and rewards influence offending
decisions, whereas deterrability refers to the capacity or inclination to engage in this …

Despite the prevalence of guilty pleas, we know relatively little about factors that influence
the decision to plead. Replicating and extending Dervan and Edkins' Journal of Criminal …