Plea Bargaining

Catalog description

Only about 2% of all federal criminal defendants go to trial, and only about 6% of state criminal defendants do so. Yet the vast majority of the training received by prosecutors and defense attorneys, both in law school and after, focuses on trials. This mini-course will instead address the mechanism(s) by which most criminal cases are actually resolved, (with a particular emphasis on the federal courts) and will attempt to provide future criminal lawyers with some of the tools needed to achieve just and fair resolutions in those cases. For the last class, students will be put into pairs (prosecutor-defense attorney), and required to conduct plea negotiations in a hypothetical case, and ultimately reach a resolution that does not involve a trial. The roles of the participants will then be reversed, and the exercise will be conducted again.