Sentence reductions for a guilty plea: The impact of the revised guideline on rates of pleas and ‘cracked trials’1
| Author | Julian V. Roberts,Jose Pina-Sánchez |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00220183211041912 |
| Published date | 01 October 2022 |
| Date | 01 October 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Sentence reductions for a guilty plea:
The impact of the revised guideline
on rates of pleas and ‘cracked trials’
1
Julian V. Roberts
Oxford University, UK
Jose Pina-Sánchez
University of Leeds, UK
Abstract
In 2017, the Sentencing Council introduced a revised guideline for plea-based sentence reductions.
The revisions were designed to provide greater certainty and to accelerate the timing of guilty
pleas. Late pleas resulting in ‘cracked trials’have long been a problem in the court system. The
guideline was not intended to change the rate of defendants who plead guilty, but rather to
increase the percentage of pleas entered early in the criminal process. This brief article reports
findings from an analysis of data from the Crown Court before and after the introduction of
the revised sentencing guideline. Findings reveal that the overall guilty plea remained stable over
the period 2014–2019. The guideline appears to have had no effect on the timing of guilty pleas
entered, and in fact the percentage of ‘cracked’trials rose in the post-guideline period.
Keywords
Guilty pleas, cracked trials, criminal procedure, sentence reductions for a guilty plea
Introduction
Defendants in all common law jurisdictions
2
benefit from plea-based sentence
reductions, although the magnitude of these reductions is generally left to the discretion of trial
1. Our thanks to Jonathan Bild and Lyndon Harris from the Sentencing Academy and the journal’s reviewer for helpful comments
on the research and a previous draft of this article.
2. Although civil law countries do not provide the opportunity to formally plead guilty, defendants may still benefit from sentence
mitigation for accepting responsibility for the offence; see J Turner and T Weigend, ‘Negotiated Case Dispositions in Germany,
England and Wales and the United States’in K Ambos, A Duff, JV Roberts and T Weigend (eds) Core Issues in Criminal Law
and Criminal Justice. Volume 1. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2020); M Langer ‘Plea Bargaining, Conviction
without trial, and the global administration of criminal convictions’(2021) 4 Annual Review of Criminology,1–35.
Corresponding author:
Julian V. Roberts, Faculty of Law, Oxford University, Oxford, Great Britain (GBR), UK.
Email: julian.roberts@crim.ox.ac.uk
Article
The Journal of Criminal Law
2022, Vol. 86(5) 327–335
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00220183211041912
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