RII Track-4:NSF: The Intersection of Social Science and the Law: Plea Bargaining Policies in Law and Practice

A majority of criminal cases in the U.S. legal system are resolved by pleas. A plea is an agreement between a prosecutor and a defendant in which the defendant typically agrees to plead guilty to receive concessions (e.g., reduced charges, less prison time) to avoid a more severe punishment than they would have received if found guilty at trial. While plea outcomes are largely public, the process that results in those outcomes is not.

Limited research has explored the process of plea bargaining. Without this information, defendants cannot make informed decisions about plea offers, arbitrary or biased patterns in plea bargaining are hidden, and the public loses access to information needed to make informed voting decisions about their local prosecutors. The Department of Criminal Justice and Legal Studies at the University of Mississippi (UM) has a growing research community, but there are no researchers focusing on plea bargaining.

Through this fellowship, the PI will travel to Duke and the Wilson Center for Science and Justice. The PI will develop expertise in plea bargaining in law and practice, partnering with local prosecutor’s offices to track trends in plea offers. The PI will bring this experience and expertise back to the home institution to develop new interdisciplinary, courses at the intersection of law and science and to further expand and develop the Center for Evidence-Based Policing & Reform at the home institution.

This Research Infrastructure Improvement Track-4 EPSCoR Research Fellows project will provide a fellowship to an Assistant Professor at UM. This fellowship will result in multiple projects at the intersection of social science and the law in the domain of plea bargaining. During the two summer fellowship periods, the PI will collaborate with a collaborator and the larger team at the Wilson Center to partner with local prosecutor offices to track plea offers.

This research will explore how plea offers change over time and whether these changes are related to defendant, victim, and prosecutor characteristics, crime type, and prosecutor office policies. This fellowship will not only expand the PI’s areas of expertise but also allow the PI to develop new skills in creating successful researcher-practitioner partnerships.

The PI will bring this experience and expertise back to UM to develop new, interdisciplinary courses at the intersection of law and science for graduate and undergraduate students. These courses will bring together students from across the university focusing on teaching students to work in interdisciplinary teams and apply the results of scientific research to the criminal justice system.

Through working with the Wilson Center, the PI will also study how a leading criminal justice research center operates to further expand and develop the Center for Evidence-Based Policing & Reform at UM.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.