"Unbundling Criminal Trial Rights"

The title of this post is the title of this intriguing short paper by John Rappaport that I just saw on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The notion that criminal defendants are put to an all-or-nothing choice between the guilty plea and full-blown jury trial is both pervasive and wrong.  Defendants can, and sometimes do, “unbundle” their jury-trial rights and trade them piecemeal, consenting to streamlined trial procedures to reduce their sentencing exposure.

This Article explores what happens if, once and for all, we eschew the all-or-nothing framework and actually encourage these “unbundled bargains.”  The parties could then tailor court procedures by agreement.  Defendants, for example, could bargain for sentencing leniency by consenting to a six-person jury.  Or the parties could agree to submit a case to private arbitration.  Would such a world be better or worse than the one we have now?  This Article takes a first cut at this question, making the uneasy case that the benefits of unbundled bargaining plausibly outweigh the costs.