Epidemic of Violations Abroad: Prosecutorial Control of Exculpatory Evidence and Plea Bargaining Rates.

Abstract

Over the last few decades, plea bargaining rates have skyrocketed in the United States. Most efforts taken by states to halt the surge of plea bargaining have not addressed prosecutorial discretion in the court, and no literature has conducted an empirical study analyzing the impact of prosecutorial handling of exculpatory evidence. I hypothesize there will be lower rates of plea bargains in states that have adopted the American Bar Association's Model Rule 3.8 (g) and (h) addressing ethical handling of exculpatory evidence. To test this, I ran a bivariate and a multivariate analysis at the county-level of 17 states, 10 with the model rule and 7 without. The existence of Model Rule 3.8 (g) and (h) has a statistically significant effect on the rate of plea bargains and there is a substantially lower predicted rate of plea bargaining within model rule states.