Victims of Coercive Plea Bargaining: Defendants Who Give False Testimony for False Pleas

The last decade has seen a significant growth in academic research and literature related to coercive plea bargaining. One thread that emerges from this research is how coercive plea practices encourage innocent defendants to falsely condemn themselves, and sometimes even other innocent people to get the benefit of a “good” deal. This Article compiles and synthesizes this research to highlight how and why typical plea bargaining can lead to false guilty pleas. It also frames those who falsely plead guilty in the face of coercive bargains and those who are subject to false testimony as a result as victims of plea bargaining.

In this way, we expand our conceptions of who should be viewed as a victim in our current system of pleas more broadly.