Abstract
Though every criminal defendant in the United States is entitled to a trial in which their innocence is presumed, in reality, few defendants exercise their right to trial today. Instead, the main method of criminal case resolution is the guilty plea, which is often reached as the result of a plea bargain. The central question of this thesis is whether any or all of the various types of plea bargaining procedures align with the normative foundations of criminal punishment. In particular, I analyze plea bargaining through the lens of Jean Hampton's expressive retributivism.
The scholarly consensus to date is that plea bargaining violates retributive principles of proportionality in punishment, because two people who commit the same crime may face vastly different sentences depending on whether they were convicted at trial or received their sentence after pleading guilty. Therefore, it is argued, a scheme of criminal punishment can either be retributivist or feature plea bargaining but cannot do both. In this thesis, I challenge that consensus by arguing that the guilty plea that comes as a part of each plea bargain carries normative weight. In particular, I argue that the guilty plea essentially accomplishes the same retributive goals as punishment. To use Hampton's language, while punishment accomplishes diminishment performed by the state, I make the case that the guilty plea accomplishes self-diminishment. Therefore, we do not have to abandon a retributive theory of punishment to justify at least some types of plea bargaining.