Book Review: Inside Plea Bargaining: The Language of Negotiation
| DOI | 10.1177/000486588802100412 |
| Date | 01 December 1988 |
| Published date | 01 December 1988 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
274
BOOK
REVIEWS (1988) 21 ANZJ Crim
an informative, workmanlike
treatment
designed largely for use by those likely to
face
the
dangers of which he writes. It draws heavily on
the
files of Control Risks
Ltd,
aprivate British firm specialising in
the
field of risk
management,
of which
Dr
Clutterbuck is a non-executive director. As he says,
the
book
is his own
"interpretation
of their practical experience in advising many
hundreds
of clients all
over
the
world on
threat
assessment
and
prevention,
and
on
the
handling of 200
such crimes".
Like his earlier work on this subject, Clutterbuck's
book
will fill an important gap
in
the
consideration of
both
political
and
purely criminal extortion. Its emphasis on
case studies
and
the
practical lessons of past incidents will complement the
more
academic
and
philosophical works now available on this subject. It will also provide
auseful guide to those travellers
and
businessmen who feel they
need
to take
more
substantial measures for their own protection,
both
at
home
and
abroad, than those
offered by official agencies.
Canberra
ANDREW
SELTH
Inside Plea Bargaining: The Language of Negotiation, Douglas WMaynard, Plenum
Press (1984) 257pp.
This
book
is a stimulating study of
the
detailed practices of
plea
bargaining based
on an analysis of transcripts of 52 misdemeanour criminal cases from aCalifornian
municipal court. Maynard analyses
the
procedures through which plea bargaining
is accomplished as an orderly production of the defence
and
prosecution lawyers
and
the
judge.
He
uses the
methods
developed in conversational analysis to
describe
the
underlying linguistic structures of bargaining sequences, for example,
the
formal system of turn-taking in
the
negotiation process
and
the
formal structure
of a discourse system for negotiation.
As
Maynard
himself admits,
one
of
the
common criticisms of conversational
analysis is
that
in trying to describe properties of conversation which are invariant
to particular settings, little attention is given to the settings
per
se. Maynard,
however, tries to relate his formal analyses to
the
specific context of the criminal
justice process.
He
describes how these formal processes
are
used by defence
and
prosecution lawyers to pursue particular strategies in
the
process of negotiation. He
uses a dramaturgical approach to demonstrate that plea bargaining is a rehearsal of
the
trial
that
probably will not
take
place. He shows how descriptions of
the
character of
the
defendant, shared assumptions about
"normal
crimes", "going
rates" for sentences, exceptions to these routine assumptions,
and
other
aspects of
the
"courtroom
culture" fit into
the
formal system of negotiation. He also
demonstrates how this system accommodates
both
formal and substantive
definitions of justice and
both
adversarial and routine procedures. This contrasts
with research which has presented
plea
bargaining as an example of
one
or
other
of these polarities.
Maynard reviews two bodies of literature: the modelling of sentencing decisions
and
the
explanations for the frequent use of plea bargaining.
For
Maynard even
the
most sophisticated sentencing models fail to explain dispositions, because the codes
used to categorise variables
are
unable to describe
the
complex and subtle
relationships
between
variables, which are only visible to
the
kind of detailed
empirical analysis thoroughly sensitive to the features of
the
setting, which Maynard
provides in this text.
To continue reading
Request your trial