Another two more open access articles from FSR issue on "The Tyranny of the Trial Penalty"

In this post a few months ago, I highlighted the publication of the latest extraordinary (double) issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter titled "The Tyranny of the Trial Penalty: The Consensus that Coercive Plea Practices Must End."  As mentioned before, this FSR issue includes 16(!) original pieces on various aspects of "The Trial Penalty," and it is fully available on-line at this link. 

As also mentioned before, though a full subscription to FSR is needed for full on-line access to all FSR content, the University of California Press has graciously agreed to make various articles from this special issue available to all on-line for a limited period.  Valuably, the issue's terrific introduction authored by Norman Reimer, executive director of NACDL, and his colleague Martín Sabelli, NACDL's second vice president, is to remain freely available for an extended period of time.  And \these two additional pieces are now accessible to all (with a paragraph quoted here):

The Insidious Injustice of the Trial Penalty: “It is not the intensity but the duration of pain that breaks the will to resist.” by Emma Andersson and Jeffery Robinson

Like most abusive practices in the criminal legal system, the trial penalty has a greater impact on people of color and the poor than it does on others. Although wealthy clients cannot buy their way out of a trial penalty, they can mitigate its impact by paying higher fines or penalties in exchange for shorter sentences. Bail pending resolution of the case can also impact the ultimate sentence — people who are out of custody at the time of sentencing tend to get shorter sentences that those who are in custody. Money and race play out in the bail system like they do in every other part of the criminal legal system. In addition to shorter sentences, the conditions of confinement faced by wealthy people (who can hire consultants to try to improve placement in a prison system) can be extraordinarily better than those generally faced by people of color and the poor.

Innocents Who Plead Guilty: An Analysis of Patterns in DNA Exoneration Cases by Glinda S. Cooper, Vanessa Meterko and Prahelika Gadtaula

Since 1989, the year of the first DNA exoneration, more than 360 people have been exonerated based on DNA evidence. The vast majority (> 98 percent) had been wrongfully convicted of serious felonies involving homicide or sexual assault. These DNA exonerations represent 15 percent of the 2,359 exonerations documented in the United States. Among the many insights drawn from these wrongful convictions is the realization that a guilty plea is not an uncommon outcome for innocent people who have been charged with a crime: 11 percent of the DNA exonerees recorded by the Innocence Project pleaded guilty.  This paper explores demographic, crime-related, and sentencing factors associated with the decision of people to plead guilty to a crime they did not commit.

Prior related posts:

• "The Trial Penalty: The Sixth Amendment Right To Trial on the Verge of Extinction and How To Save It" 
• Latest (double) issue of FSR covers "The Tyranny of the Trial Penalty": An introduction 
• Two new open access articles from FSR issue on "The Tyranny of the Trial Penalty"
• Two more open access articles from FSR issue on "The Tyranny of the Trial Penalty"