Plea bargaining does not occur in a vacuum. There are several actors (e.g., prosecutors, defense attorneys, defendants) directly involved with plea negotiations and plea decisions. As approximately 95 percent of state and federal convictions result from guilty pleas, the decision-making process that defendants and other actors undergo during plea negotiations is important to understand. This chapter will address the unique and overlapping theoretical, practical, cognitive, and social influence factors that underlie the plea negotiation process and ultimate plea decision. Specifically, this chapter will focus on negotiations – particularly how attorneys approach negotiation ideologically and practically – and the power dynamics present when two or more actors attempt to influence each other. Furthermore, we will discuss the basic social (e.g., obedience to authority) and cognitive (e.g., heuristics) processes that drive defendant decision-making when interacting with prosecutors and defense attorneys. Finally, policy implications and future directions for research will be discussed throughout the chapter.

After making an arrest, a police officer typically refers the matter to the local prosecutor’s office. Once presented with a case, that office decides whether to charge the defendant with a crime and, if so, which crime(s). Even if prosecutors initially file a charge, they can still dismiss the case later on. If prosecutors do not dismiss the case, they can seek an informal resolution (often called “diversion”), negotiate a plea bargain on behalf of the government, or take the case to trial. These decisions about which cases to prosecute, and how, are important contributors to the incarceration rate. As this chapter explains, over the era of Mass Incarceration, prosecutors’ primary contribution was to follow the lead of police and legislators. Prosecutors applied the new tools enacted by legislators leading to more severe punishments for crimes generally. And, perhaps most importantly, they uncritically accepted the new mix of arrests forwarded to them by police, flooding the courts with a higher proportion of cases that were easy to prove and punish.

Peru’s Lava Jato stretched its tentacles widely and ravaged the political establishment. Grand corruption cases present a series of challenges related to how to secure evidence in information-poor and politically hostile environments. Overcoming these challenges without jeopardizing the integrity of the inquiry is no small feat. The tools that prosecutors rely on generate controversy, as well as tensions between effectiveness and due process that are difficult to resolve. Success therefore calls for clever and skillful prosecutors. The analysis digs deep into the dynamics of Peru’s Lava Jato to discuss the nature of these challenges and how prosecutors dealt with them. Contingent choices often determined whether enough evidence came to light, thus widening the window for ambitious investigative efforts. The chapter further looks at the backlash that ensued, how this conditioned prosecutorial efforts, and why investigators were able to mitigate its impact. One interesting feature of Peru’s Lava Jato is that prosecutors not only had to deal with an obstructionist political class, but also with networks of judicial clientelism commanded by senior officials. The chapter traces how rank-and-file prosecutors negotiated such bureaucratic pathologies to protect the inquiry, and discusses the likely impact of these struggles on the future of the case.

This chapter explores the late 20th/early 21st century historical roots and reasoning of the animal protection movement’s efforts to strengthen animal anti-cruelty laws. With that backdrop, the chapter then discusses the essential need for data narrowly focused on anti-cruelty investigation and prosecution outcomes as advocates today consider criminal justice reform policy developments, and how recent legal and social advances can help support animal victims in the future.

The Gestapo gradually wrested enforcement authority from the courts between 1935 and 1939. A conflict over jurisdiction played out in national journals as the political police asserted a mandate of prevention. At first, case officers reported findings to prosecutors without commentary. After Himmler became Chief of German Police in June 1936, the Gestapo routinely withheld cases with insufficient evidence to convict and even dropped charges against a few remarkably loyal offenders in extraordinary circumstances. Enforcement authority remained with prosecutors in most cases. The Party and the Ministry of Justice exercised joint discretion built into the law to target highly public offences, recidivists, and political opponents presumed to be subversives. But the Gestapo increasingly encroached by prescribing a desired outcome in the case summary. Political police used these “recommendations,” backed by the power of protective custody, to gradually assert control over enforcement decisions by the judiciary. By 1939, the Gestapo determined who deserved to be punished based on their character, while the courts determined who could be punished based on available evidence.

The Gestapo balanced the scales of justice with the weights of people’s community from 1939 to 1942. Political police resolved twice as many cases while state prosecutors’ workload, but not conviction rates, dropped by a third. The Gestapo evaluated “political reliability” based on a range of socio-political behaviours distinguishing upstanding “racial comrades,” who embodied the values of people’s community, from subversive opponents who either rejected Nazism or embraced alien ideologies. Supporters might complain, but they sincerely apologized, cooperated, and usually conformed. Subversives advocated alternatives. At best, repeat offenders were simply chronic complainers. Private exchanges might be overlooked, but repeated public criticism was intolerable. Hinting toward a change of government was utterly unforgivable. Supporters who acted in “momentary weakness” received “psychological understanding” and educational warnings. Subversives who called for regime change, swayed other against Nazism, or were connected to targeted minorities faced the courts. Himmler’s mandate “to create and uphold the desired order” of a people’s community was finally being realized.

This chapter examines the development of Allied policy toward German courts in all four occupation zones. The chapter begins by analyzing the limitations in the denazification of the German legal profession. It then turns to the policies adopted by the four occupying powers toward granting German courts jurisdiction over Nazi crimes. Allied Control Council Law No. 10 of December 1945 allowed the occupation authorities to grant German courts jurisdiction over Nazi crimes against humanity, which included crimes against German citizens. In the British and French Zones, German courts were granted general jurisdiction over Nazi crimes against humanity. In the American zone, fears of German pushback led the Americans to authorize the Germans to prosecute Nazi crimes only under domestic law, not as crimes against humanity. In the Soviet Occupation Zone, a complex process of politicization took place. At first the Soviets allowed Germans to proseucte Nazi crimes against humanity in criminal courts. They the folded crimes against humanity prosecutions into the broader program of denazification. This led to an increased politicization of these trials, though they did not become complete sham trials until the so-called Waldheim Trials of 1950.

The questions and concerns addressed in this book cannot be evaluated in isolation from race and class, especially because the state finds many ways of making criminals out of its citizens. Racial disparities dominate all forms of policing in the United States, regardless of sex and income. However, the shocking toll of male incarceration crowds out research and more nuanced understandings of women’s engagement with the penal system. Sadly, researchers and policymakers tend to view incarceration through a male lens. However, they are missing a very grave, rapidly emerging social problem. Marginalized women are funnelled in and out of the American justice system at alarming rates. They are invisible. Their experiences with mass incarceration, police brutality, sexual violence, shackling while pregnant (if in the penal system), birthing behind bars, medical neglect, restrictions on housing access after release, and other pernicious encroachments on their daily lives are rarely rendered visible. Consequently, male accounts about mass incarceration, while troubling and certainly not inaccurate, fail to problematize and offer a detailed reading of prisons and penal systems. More importantly, these depictions fall short of informing the American public about women and children as the casualties of the nation’s overpriced and unsuccessful drug war.

This chapter highlights how legislators, prosecutors, and judges sympathetic to a tough-on-crime or “using the stick” approach to pregnant women and their bodies miscalculate the human and financial costs of their decision-making. Their approaches do not improve health outcomes for women or their children. Rather, legislators, prosecutors, and judges are misguided to believe that harsh criminal punishments and invasive civil sanctions reduce the incidents of miscarriage, stillbirth, low birth weight, genetic abnormalities, childhood asthma, obesity, diabetes, and more. Yet, these conditions are not improved, let alone cured, through criminal punishment or civil confinement of pregnant women.

This chapter provides a general picture of the criminal justice system in Hong Kong. It highlights the roles and powers of key criminal justice agencies including the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF), the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) and the prosecution. It includes discussion of police powers and prosecutorial decision-making. This chapter also goes through the criminal procedure, drawing attention to key decision points such as bail, court venue, the plea and the standard of proof. It concludes by looking at the various sentencing options at the court’s disposal.