Commonalities in false guilty plea cases

ABSTRACT

False guilty pleas, when innocent people are wrongfully convicted by pleading guilty, have beset criminal legal systems since the time guilty pleas came into existence. Today, of the nearly 3,300 exoneration cases catalogued by the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE), about 25% are wrongful convictions via guilty plea, with the remaining 75% by trial. In the present study, we code the known population of wrongful plea convictions, comparing them to the known population of wrongful trial convictions on numerous factors (e.g. dispositional and situational risk factors) to identify defining characteristics of false guilty plea cases. Overall, we found many notable differences. False guilty plea cases are four times more likely to involve a false confession and be the ‘no-crime’ type of wrongful conviction than trial cases. In contrast, trial cases were significantly more likely to involve eyewitness misidentification, forensic science errors, perjury or false accusations, and documented ineffective assistance of counsel claims than false guilty plea cases. Results shed much-needed light on the factors that associate with false guilty pleas.

KEYWORDS:

• Guilty pleas
• innocence
• wrongful convictions
• exonerations
• trials

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at https://osf.io/9at8m/

Notes

1 Interestingly, a fourth person, Mary Berner, one of the few women in Borchard’s sample, was encouraged to plead guilty but refused. The judge then entered a plea of guilty for her and sentenced her to probation.

2 For more detail on this and other definitions, see https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/glossary.aspx.

3 To identify the additional 21 FGPs (i.e., those not tagged as #P), we searched the NRE summaries of non-#P cases for ‘ple’ to identify possible pleas (pled, etc.). Words that were not plea-related (such as ‘sample’) were ignored. This search resulted in 180 cases that were reviewed in greater detail. Of these, 21 additional adult exonerees were coded as having falsely pled guilty. The remaining cases mentioned such things as the true perpetrator having pled guilty, co-defendants of the exoneree who had pled guilty, and exonerees who later pled guilty to crimes they did commit; none of these were considered false guilty pleas in this subsample of cases.

4 Note that while we report results from multiple analyses, each analysis was testing a separate null hypothesis (i.e., Does this particular factor differ for FGP versus trial cases?).

5 Homicide included cases of murder, accessory to murder, attempted murder, and manslaughter.