Jury Trials and Plea Bargaining: A True History by Mike McConville and Chester L. Mirsky
| Date | 01 September 2006 |
| Author | Lindsay Farmer |
| Published date | 01 September 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2006.0614_5.x |
rati¢cation process to be generally unproblematic. Does this prospect now seem
rather na|«ve? I do not think so, since the authors make a nçalmost premonitoryç
reservation: ‘. . . there are good arguments for welcoming the Constitution. And
provided there are serious and objective debates in the Member States, there seems little
reason why the national rati¢cation processes should not come to the same con-
clusion’ (p114, emphasis added). In general, the fact thatthe Constitution has been
put on ice does not render obsolete the ideas and conclusions presented in this
monograph. Since the authors succeed in giving an accurate picture of some of
the many problems facing the European Union at present and in exposing the
details of a paradigmatic example of political negotiations at the highest level,
the book still prompts useful re£ection.
Alicia Hi narejos Parga
n
Mike McConville and Chester L. Mirsky,Jury Trials and Plea Bargaining: A True
History
,Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005, xxivþ364pp.
While the phenomenon of plea bargaining was ‘discovered’ by academics in
the 1970s, it has taken much longer for the practice to attract the attention of
historians of criminal justice. Yet there are some important questions that need
answering about the practice both as a meansof illuminating our understanding
of the history of criminal justice, and for the light that they can throw on our
understanding of the contemporary practices of plea bargaining.When did plea
bargaining begin in its modern form? When did it replace trial by jury as the
primary means of disposing of criminal cases? And why did it come into exis-
tence? These are the questions that are addressed in this long, fascinating, and
occasionally frustrating, study of criminal justice in nineteenth-century New
York City.
The development of plea bargaining has now been studied in a number of
locations on both sides of the Atlantic.What we ¢nd in these studies is a broad
consensus that plea bargainingdeveloped rapidly in the mid-nineteenth-century,
but disagreement overthe explanations for this. Some accounts seek to take those
factorsthat havebeen identi¢ed by sociologists as drivingthe contemporaryprac-
tice ^ principally case load pressures and the professionalisation of lawyers and
policing ^ and to trace their historical roots. Plea bargaining, according to these
accounts, must be seen as an inevitable consequence of themodernisation of the
criminal justiceprocess. Another set of explanations claims that, notwithstanding
the temporal coincidences, we should bewary of these kinds of general explana-
tions not onlybecause of the dangers ofpresentism (reading our present concerns
into explanations of the past), but because they tend to £atten important di¡er-
ences in the culture of criminal justice at di¡erent times and places.The argument
presented in this book is aimed squarely at this debate, taking defenders of the
professionalisation thesis to task for their inattention to the involvement of law-
yers in the early nineteenth-century trial, and for suggesting that trials in this
period were informal and unprofessional. They argue that any analysis must be
n
Universityof Oxford.
Reviews
866 rThe Modern LawReview Limited 2006
(2006) 69(5)MLR 855^868
To continue reading
Request your trial