This chapter introduces readers to the history of the problem of ‘cracked trials’, that are trials that do not proceed on the scheduled day, yet does not need rescheduling, as the case has already reached an outcome. The predominant reason for this is the defendant entering a late guilty plea. According to official discourse, cracked trials are attributed to tactical defendants who ‘play the system’ by delaying their guilty pleas. This chapter also introduces readers to the sentence discount as a response to encouraging defendants to plead guilty, and to plead guilty as early as possible. Under the sliding scale of sentence discounts, the early you plead guilty, the greater the sentence discount you receive. The rest of the chapter outlines the rest of the book.

This chapter revisits the assumptions that have dominated official discourse about ‘cracked trials’ and the utilitarian benefits of a sliding scale of sentence discount. First, it investigates whether defendants did ‘play the system’ before the implementation of the quantified sliding scale of sentence discounts. From the limited studies available, the answer to this question is mixed at best. Second, this chapter investigates whether the sliding scale of sentence discounts has helped the courts resolve their problem of cracked trials. Data before and after the introduction of the sliding scale of sentence discounts suggest that not much has changed in terms of guilty plea rates, cracked trial rates, and average waiting time until trial, bringing into question the usefulness of the sliding scale in promoting efficiency. The rest of the chapter details the methodology and datasets for this book, namely the Crown Court Sentencing Survey and the Hong Kong District Court dataset, paving the way for the analyses in proceeding chapters.