Overview

This course will focus on four lenses, each with its own way of exploring the world based upon different assumptions and approaches. When we examine a specific technology that influenced a social, cultural, or global event through different lenses, it may alter the way we look at the technology. The four general education interdisciplinary lenses are history, humanities, natural and applied sciences, and social science.
History is the study of the past and its connection to the present. It encompasses content, memories, and events situated in time.
Humanities is the study of cultures creative expression and contemplates metaphor, experience, and meaning.
Natural and applied sciences study the material world grounded in the scientific method.
Social sciences study human relationships and social structures grounded in demographic and statistic measurements.
When we look at an event in our lives, we often jump between different frameworks to make sense of it. For instance, if we attend a music concert, we might move from an artistic lens (How did they create the musical score?) to a technical lens (How does all the lighting work?) to a financial lens (How much money do the performers earn?). Similarly, looking through the general education interdisciplinary lenses can help us see things from other perspectives by giving us a conscious way to analyze them, helping to broaden our perspective.
This assignment prepares you to choose a topic and lens for your project by first applying all four lenses. Before completing this activity, review the Project Guidelines and Rubric to know exactly what you will be working on. You may still change your choice of topic until the next module.

Directions

As part of your project, you will describe a social, cultural, or global event where a technology plays a significant role. For this activity, you will write a short paper on the specific technology of your choice. Choose a specific technology that influenced a social, cultural, or global event that you are interested in. Your selection could be something that you have personally experienced or that you are interested in knowing more about. Review the module resources and visit the

IDS 403 Library Guide
for guidance on how to select and narrow a topic. After selecting your topic, do some preliminary research to make sure you can address the required elements of your project.

In your paper, you must apply each lens to your event by using its language and perspectives. You are not required to answer each question below the rubric criteria, but you may use them to better understand the criteria and guide your thinking and writing.
Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:
1. Describe your
existing knowledgeabout the specific technology that influenced a social, cultural, and global event.

A. You might describe your personal experience with the technology, what you learned in school, or what your assumptions are about the technology. Ask, what do I know (or
thinkI know)?

2. Apply the
history lensto your technology.

A. Using the language of history as it is defined in your resources, and as it is used in academic journals, how would you write about your technology? What events and dates have occurred that are important to your technology? Has the significance of the technology diminished or shifted with time? Who are the authors of the historical record(s) related to your technology?
3. Apply the
humanities lensto your technology.

A. Using the language of the humanities as it is defined in your resources, and as it is used in academic journals, how would you write about your technology? What meaning does your technology have within cultures? How do people express themselves regarding your technology? What are peoples lived experiences with your technology?
4. Apply the
natural and applied sciences lensto your technology.

A. Using the language of the natural and applied sciences as it is defined in your resources, and as it is used in academic journals, how would you write about your technology? How might the scientific method be used to examine some aspect of your technology? How might your technology relate to the physical or material world? Are there any challenges to viewing your technology objectively?
5. Apply the
social science lensto your technology.

A. Using the language of the social sciences as it is defined in your resources, and as it is used in academic journals, how would you write about your technology? Who is affected by your technology? How might your technology affect interpersonal relationships? What social structures and systems relate to your technology?
What to Submit
Submit your activity as a 1- to 2-page Microsoft Word document with double spacing, 12-point Times New Roman font, and one-inch margins. If sources are used, they should be cited according to APA style. Consult the
Shapiro Library APA Style Guidefor more information on citations.

Ref:

The Four General Education Lenses
Reading:

The Social Life of Information

Reading:
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Reading:

Introduction to Sociology
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1-Aug

Assigned Reading: Thistlewaite and Wooldredge, Part2 Chapter 2, The Defense Attorney’s Role in Plea Bargaining: Are defendants pressured by their own attorney’s to plead guilty? pp. 154-161.

After reading the article answer the following questions in a discussion posting:

1. Do you think the methodology used to complete this study was valid?
2. What limitations do you see, if any,in the way the study was conducted?
3. Given the changes in the knowledge of today’s defendants as it relates to the legal system and plea bargaining are this study’s finding still valid? Why or Why not?

the defense attoRneys Role in Plea BaRGaininG: aRe defendants PRessuRed By theiR oWn attoRneys to Plead Guilty?
Alschuler, A. (1975). The Defense Attorneys Role in Plea Bargaining. Yale Law Journal 84:1179314.
Background As mentioned previously, guilty pleas account for the vast majority of felony convictions. We take this for granted today, but there was once much controversy over the ethics of attorneys
encouraging their clients to forego their constitutional right to trial. This concern generated some of the most interesting ethnographies in court research to date. These studies were invalu-able, not so much for the ethical discussions of plea bargaining per se, but for the more realistic descriptions of criminal courts, court politics, and court participants. These were the studies that changed our images of courts from being fair and impartial arbiters of justice to fallible organiza-tions controlled by individuals who sometimes do not have the best interests of their clients in mind. The seemingly heavy focus of these studies on plea bargaining, written primarily between the mid-1960s and late 1970s, reflected academics questions about the wisdom of the American Bar Association and the Presidents Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in their official approval of plea bargaining in 1967. (The Supreme Court also weighed in on the issue, declaring its constitutionality in 1971.) Scholars were critical of the fact that guilty pleas were the dominant mode of case disposition, which also contrasted with the publics con-ception of due process. Law schools do not even educate students about the underlying politics of the guilty plea process. Plea bargaining occurs when a defendant submits a plea of guilty in exchange for reduced
charges and/or a reduced sentence from the court. (Sentences are reduced relative to what the law recommends and what is likely to be handed out at trial.) Legal scholars primary concerns with plea bargaining lie in the questionable ethics surrounding how guilty pleas are solicited from defendants. A defendant who pleads guilty implicitly agrees to forego their constitutional right to trial and, unlike a trial conviction, cannot appeal the verdict. There are other potential limitations as well, as articulated by Jonathan Casper (1972). First, plea bargaining contributes to different sentences for similarly situated offenders charged with the same crimes. Second, there is a risk under such a system that innocent persons will admit guilt out of fear of facing harsher sentences if convicted at trial. Third, sentences are not based on meaningful goals such as rehabilitation or even retribution. Fourth, the process might convey a sense of corruption to the defendant. Finally, there is very little formal control over the process. On the other hand, several justifications for plea bargaining have also been put forth. First,
there are not enough available resources to take all cases to trial in a timely fashion. Second, plea bargaining helps to avoid mandatory sentences that may be overly severe in particular cases due to unique circumstances of the cases. Third, the process allows trial resources to be reserved for cases where a suspects guilt is truly in question. Fourth, defendants who acknowledge their guilt might be experiencing a first step toward their rehabilitation and should be rewarded with a reduced sentence. Finally, the defendant actively participates in the plea bargaining process and shapes the punishment to some extent, possibly reducing his cynicism toward legal authority. Albert Alschuler wrote a series of three articles focusing on the roles of prosecutors,
defense attorneys, and judges in plea bargaining. Taken together, these articles constitute a scath-ing critique of the guilty plea process. The article described here has been cited in every sub-sequent publication on the topic, and it also offers unique insight into defense attorneys that cannot be gleaned from the other studies discussed in this book. Perhaps this is due to the scope of Alschulers study, which included interviews with court actors across ten major US cities. His observations now represent common knowledge among court scholars, and no related study has encompassed the scope of Alschulers larger project.
the study
Alschuler (1975) began his article with the acknowledgment that guilty pleas were far and away the most common means to convictions in the criminal courts, accounting for roughly 90 percent of all felony convictions in the courts he studied during the late 1960s. Although safeguards were in place to ensure that defendants who pled guilty understood the ramifications of their actions, Alschuler set out to interview court participants in ten major cities in order to explore the utility of defense attorneys for protecting the accused in the plea bargaining process. These interviews were unstructured and, therefore, did not constitute scientific data. Interviews were conducted between 1967 and 1968 in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston,
Los Angeles, Manhattan, Oakland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. Alschulers com-panion piece, The Prosecutors Role in Plea Bargaining, was published in 1968 and was based on the same project.
findings
Alschuler made the observation that the only way a defense attorney could be financially suc-cessful, aside from being an excellent trial attorney, was to handle large numbers of clients. This meant that trials could not be the norm for such attorneys since they required too much time, and so they spent the majority of their time pleading cases. Alschuler went on to describe exam-ples of attorneys with very lucrative careers who had not tried a case in years (he referred to these attorneys as pleaders). Only a small minority of these attorneys were truly dishonest, however, even though pleaders in general never intended to go to trial (but would go if pressed to do so). The primary problem with pleaders was that, due to their impatience and desire to move cases, they often settled for less attractive plea agreements relative to those secured by other attorneys who more actively argued and negotiated with prosecutors. If pleaders performed poorly, then, why did defendants choose them as their attorneys?
First, bail bondsmen often recommended the names of attorneys who provided the bondsmen with a cut of their legal fees (recall the earlier discussion of the bail system examined by Foote 1954). Second, some jail and police personnel made similar recommendations in order to receive kickbacks from these attorneys. Finally, these attorneys occasionally hung out in jails in order to drum up business. How did the attorneys induce their clients to plead guilty? If a client admitted guilt to his attorney, the attorney might later return and claim that the prosecutor had an unbeat-able case against him, whether true or not. If the client claimed innocence, the lawyer might have gone to great lengths to get a confession. Another tactic involved attorneys approaching family members who, once convinced that pleading guilty was the right thing to do, would persuade the relative to plead guilty. Equally reprehensible, some attorneys would exaggerate to their cli-ents the severity of the sentence if convicted at trial, or claim that the prosecutors offer for a bargain was exceptionally lenient when in fact it was the going rate. Alschuler noted the absurdity of how, when convicted defendants tried to challenge their guilty pleas due to corrupt defense attorneys, courts refused to treat those pleas as invalid. As a result of a system that permitted lawyers to perform their jobs informally and in private, there were extraordinary opportunities for dishonest lawyers (p. 1198) to take advantage of defendants. Alschuler talked at length, for example, of how some attorneys charged lower fees to clients who they felt were likely to plead guilty, thus contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy where these attorneys worked even harder to secure guilty pleas. Even though defendants could challenge the quality of their representation in the courtroom, the absence of any oversight in the guilty plea process made it virtually impossible for defendants to challenge the circumstances under which pleas were negotiated. Even the most honest attorneys sometimes preferred plea bargaining over the prospect
of going to trial, especially when they questioned their own abilities. Going to trial also meant taking a chance, no matter how good the defense, since jurors and some judges could base their decisions on extralegal factors. Another situation sometimes faced by private attorneys (not public defenders) involved the same attorney representing two defendants involved in the same case. In such cases, the attorney generally perceived one client as more culpable than the other. This situation led some of these attorneys to bargain with prosecutors over dropping the charges against one defendant in exchange for a guilty plea from the other. This situation is unlikely with public defenders because most trial courts automatically assign different defenders to different defendants involved in the same case in order to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. The observations above were made in relation to private defense attorneys, and Alschuler
recognized that the guilty plea process favored the economic interests of those attorneys more than salaried public defendants. Nonetheless, both groups used guilty pleas to the same degree, which implied a different set of motivations for public defenders. For example, PDs dealt with more socially and economically disadvantaged defendants who often had prior records. In these cases attorneys sometimes pursued plea bargains in order to reduce the odds of more severe sentences at trials resulting from the defendants criminal histories and/or from potential biases held by some jurors toward poor, minority defendants. Another unique situation faced by PDs was their greater familiarity with prosecutors due to courtroom assignments and having to face the same attorneys day after day. Friendships developed between these attorneys that interfered with their willingness to argue over the facts of a case when settling on a plea bargain. The relatively heavy caseloads of PDs in the cities examined by Alschuler may have also
affected attorneys interests in bargaining. For every defendant an attorney fought vigorously for, another clients case did not receive the same attention. On the other hand, even defendants who received less attention from their PD may have still fared better in plea bargains relative to the clients of private defense lawyers due to the prosecutors greater trust of public defend-ers. Prosecutors were also more willing to disclose evidence to PDs relative to private attorneys, although this could work against a defendant if the PD was looking for evidence to convince a defendant to plead guilty. Alschuler speculated that this was why prosecutors were more willing to disclose their evidence to PDs, especially in the strongest cases against defendants. Eisenstein and Jacob (1977) once observed that, in Chicago, delaying case dispositions led
to less appealing bargains offered to defendants. Alschuler observed the opposite, where defense attorneys received better offers with the passage of time because witnesses became impatient with so many court appearances, their memories faded, and they sometimes backed out of the process altogether. As the odds of conviction declined, the prosecutors plea bargains became more attrac-tive. Private lawyers were better able than PDs to take advantage of this, however, because of the greater difficulty PDs had in requesting continuances. PDs assigned to one courtroom for weeks at a time would attract suspicion by the prosecutor and the judge if they developed a pattern of requesting continuances. It was also not in the best interest of many PDs clients to delay trial since many did not obtain bond and were held in custody during the interim. Attorneys also anticipated how receptive particular judges would be to specific bargains,
and so they sought out the more lenient judges. Due to a selection bias where tougher judges conducted more trials (because they were less likely to approve more lenient plea agreements), private attorneys could shop around for more lenient judges who were sympathetic to particular bargains. This was an advantage for private lawyers only, however, since PDs in most of the cities examined were assigned to courtrooms and could not choose their judge. On the other hand, PDs who were more likely to push for trial faced a different problem where more lenient judges placed pressure on PDs to bargain. Alschuler related many examples of the insulting comments directed at defense attorneys by judges. Judges varied to the extent they favored the guilty plea process, and those who saw plea bargaining as effective case management were more apt to ridicule attor-neys who were resistant to bargaining. Incurring the judges wrath was not in the best interest of the defense lawyer who had to work with the same judge day after day. Public defenders were also more likely to maintain antagonistic relationships with their
clients relative to private attorneys and their clients, perhaps because indigent defendants did not choose their attorneys. These types of relations between PDs and their clients may have con-tributed to higher odds of plea bargaining if the defenders were generally less interested in the welfare of their clients. Although the greater caseload pressures on PDs would sometimes interfere with the best
interests of their clients, they sometimes used their caseloads as leverage for more lenient plea agreements. PDs had the ability to slow down case processing by threatening trials for some of their cases. Even when prosecutors were not amenable to such threats, judges sometimes placed pressure on prosecutors to cooperate with PDs. Alschuler made an important distinction between PDs and other appointed attorneys,
including attorneys in the community who were ordered by judges to defend indigent defendants as well as those who volunteered to do so. These particular attorneys sometimes did not fit well in a system dependent on guilty pleas. First, such attorneys were often paid hourly and so may have opted for trials in order to increase their earnings. Second, due to their (typical) lack of experi-ence in the criminal courts, they were often not privy to courtroom cultures and the informal norms surrounding plea negotiations. Alschuler concludes with a discussion of ethical issues related to plea bargaining in prac-tice, the most salient of which involves a system that places pressure on the truly innocent defen-dant to plead guilty. Most attorneys who believed their clients were innocent did not admit to pressuring them into pleading guilty, although some defense attorneys did so when prosecutors offered very large concessions relative to what the laws dictated in such cases. Alschuler also noted hypocrisy in the observations of defense attorneys, namely that these attorneys did not apply the same rule (of not pressuring innocent clients into pleading guilty) when defendants claimed to have acted in self-defense, or when they argued entrapment, or when there was an absence of intent. Of the innocent defendants who were not pressured to plead guilty, some public defenders may have acted out of self-interest in order to avoid client accusations of inef-fective representation.
limitations
Alschulers work is a very informative piece on the abuses of plea bargaining even though he admitted that it was not a scientific study. As such, his observations were potentially tainted by selection bias. Alschuler was one of the harshest and most outspoken critics of plea bargaining, and this was reflected in the interview excerpts he chose to include in the article. These pas-sages focused overwhelmingly on court participants who were critical of plea bargaining. No direct quotes were offered from the dishonest attorneys who he claimed were the strongest advocates of the guilty plea process. The reader is not informed about how many attorneys and judges were interviewed and what proportions of these groups were advocates of the process. This method of argumentation is persuasive but does not meet the standard of scientific rigor. Alschuler might have focused only on instances where defendants received raw deals. For all we know, the vast majority of his subjects might have been advocates of the process and the vast majority of defendants might have benefited from not going to trial. His arguments were built on selected evidence, not unlike the arguments of ex-cons regarding what terrible places prisons are. The primary drawback to this strategy of argumentation is that it is flawed by nature of not offering a solution. Just as prisoners-turned-academics tend to criticize the use of prisons without offering a solution (short of decarceration), Alschulers arguments are more difficult to defend without offering a viable alternative to the guilty plea process. One of the criticisms of plea bargaining noted earlier is the possibility that sentencing dis-parities might emerge based on the extralegal characteristics of defendants. Speculations such as these can only be evaluated empirically with official data on the sentences of defendants who plead guilty versus those convicted at trial, and such evaluations are quantitative in nature. Eisenstein and Jacob (1977), described in the next section, conducted both qualitative and quan-titative research on the guilty plea process in three urban trial courts. Alschuler, on the other hand, was limited to evaluating this criticism based only on the observations of somewhat critical attorneys. Despite his approach, however, Alschuler was surprisingly neutral in his assessment of possible biases in plea negotiations based on the economic status of defendants. He commented that, while public defenders had proportionately more indigent clients than private attorneys, both types of attorneys seemed to engage in plea bargaining to the same extent. Nearly forty years have passed since Alschulers publications on plea bargaining, yet since
that time it appears that most criminal defendants have found plea bargaining no less palatable than going to trial. There are several possible reasons for this, including a Supreme Court rul-ing after Alschulers work that outlawed judicial participation in plea negotiations. Alschulers description of how judges placed pressures on attorneys to settle their cases underscored the potential of judges to abuse their power by coercing subordinates into ignoring defendants legal interests. Without these pressures, defense attorneys are better able to serve the interests of their clients. With the prosecution and the defense as sole arbiters in negotiations, it is more realistic to assume that one party or the other would insist on a trial if a plea agreement did not improve the positions of both the defendant and the state. A second possible reason why plea bargaining was not subsequently challenged is because
such negotiations permit compromises on both sides of the case. The defense is better able to avoid the maximum punishment, thus permitting sentences that are more apt to fit with the unique circumstances of cases. Prosecutors, in turn, can secure convictions without having to spend the resources necessary to create stronger cases for trial. This last observation reflects the economic advantage of guilty pleas, where failure to offer such rewards could lead a majority of defendants to opt for trial which, in turn, might slow case processing. No less important is the potential benefit of plea bargaining to a defendant who wishes
to avoid the stigmatization and degradation of a trial. Labeling theorists argue that the criminal trial is nothing more than a ritual for publicly redefining a defendants life as deviant. The trial process generates greater cynicism on the part of defendants toward legal authority because they are constantly defending themselves while under attack, sometimes for months at a time. Plea bargaining, by contrast, allows the defendant to actively participate in this redefinition which is not under public view and (usually) results in a less negative stigma.
significance and subsequent Research
Court scholars who took a decidedly negative view of plea bargaining, such as Alschuler, ulti-mately had a significant impact on Alaskas ban on plea bargaining in 1975. The ban prohib-ited negotiations of charge or sentence reductions for all offenses. Interestingly, this resulted in only a 30 percent increase in the number of trials (Rubinstein and White 1979), implying that most defendants continued to plead guilty. (A 30 percent increase in trial rates translated into a relatively small number of trials in Alaskan courts.) A few years later, however, Lynn Mather (1979) described how many of the bench trials in Alaska had become forums for plea bargaining, or slow pleas of guilty, where judges basically encouraged defendants to plead out. Alaskas ban continued until 1993 even though the practice of charge bargaining reemerged before then and became commonplace across the state. Regardless, the official ban did not slow down case pro-cessing to an appreciable degree, contrary to what critics expected. The Alaska Judicial Council conducted two evaluations of the reform. The first evaluation was conducted five years after implementation, and the second was conducted 15 years after. Together they revealed that the reform was fairly successful in preventing charge bargaining for about 10 years. Prosecutors also became more effective at screening cases and conducting more thorough investigations, ulti-mately leading to stronger cases, because they could no longer count on plea bargaining in order to secure convictions in cases with weaker evidence. Court delays were actually reduced rather than lengthened, perhaps because of the elimination of prosecutors tactics to schedule cases for trial in order to persuade defense attorneys to accept their offers (as described by Alschuler). Finally, the ban did not lead to harsher sentences for most crimes although it did coincide with more severe sentences for a small number of offenses. By the mid-1980s, prosecutors did not maintain the negative attitudes toward bargaining that characterized the 1970s. This change in court culture eventually led to the repeal of the ban in 1993. The Alaska experiment served to vindicate critics of plea bargaining, including Alschuler,
because the strongest argument favoring the preservation of plea bargaining was the specula-tion that courts would slow down and bottleneck if negotiations were abolished. Alaska courts do not deal with the caseload volume of the cities included in Alschulers study, but the fact that trials increased by only 30 percent instead of 100 percent was very revealing about the impact a ban on plea bargaining might have in other states. The return to bargaining in Alaska did not reflect a need to address any problems that emerged as a result of the ban, but instead reflected the interests of prosecutors to avert trials whenever possible in order to increase their chances of obtaining convictions. Alschuler was also one of the first scholars to provide insight into the realities of Herbert
Packers (1967) theory on assembly-line justice. Packer observed that the criminal court system in the United States represents a compromise between due process and crime control. The due process model emphasizes the legal protections offered to criminal suspects so as not to wrongly convict individuals (e.g., right to counsel, right to trial, right to appeal, etc.). It is grounded in the presumption of innocence and in protecting the rights of the accused. Advocates of the crime control perspective, by contrast, emphasize the publics protection from crime rather than the protection of suspects. A crime control emphasis has two implications for court proceedings. First, the demand of case processing must meet the supply of cases that flood the courts, so case processing must be swift. Second, the rights of the accused need not be emphasized at the expense of protecting the public since the vast majority of suspects are factually guilty, assuming that police officers perform their jobs adequately. Therefore, a preoccupation with trials and appeals is not necessary because most cases can be handled expediently with plea bargaining. The best way to handle cases is through an assembly line process whereby cases are handled efficiently and disposed of quickly. The focal point of the crime control model is plea bargaining whereas the focal point of the due process model is the trial. Alschulers in-depth interviews with prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges (reflecting
all three of his publications from the same study) offered a very realistic assessment of Packers framework. Not only did he capture attorneys preoccupations with the assembly-line model, he also underscored the ideological conflict between due process and crime control. Regarding the atter, even most defense attorneys presumed their clients to be guilty. Alschuler also provided an important qualification to Packers theory although he did not himself make the connection. That is, Packer theorized that prosecutors who followed a crime control strategy would pay more atten-tion to their decisions at intake regarding whether to pursue formal charges against an arrested suspect, and that they would be careful to pursue prosecutions only in cases involving little doubt about the suspects guilt. Alschuler countered this idea by describing interviews where attorneys either knew their clients were innocent or strongly suspected that they were innocent yet agreed to plea bargain in order to avoid harsher sentences if found guilty at trial. Recent research supports the idea that even self-proclaimed innocent defendants will sometimes plead guilty even though inno-cents in general are less likely than guilty defendants to accept plea bargains (e.g., Tor et al. 2010). Along with scholars such as Jon Casper (1972), James Eisenstein and Herbert Jacob (1977), Milton Heumann (1978), and Lynn Mather (1979), Alschulers research inspired a movement within polit-ical science and legal studies to more carefully assess how the conflict between due process and crime control impacts both criminal defendants and public perceptions of justice. Alschulers work also raised questions regarding the impact of plea bargaining on sentenc-ing disparities, or differences in the sentences administered to similarly situated defendants (i.e., those charged with the same offenses under similar case circumstances and with similar criminal histories). Even under more structured sentencing schemes designed to reduce disparate sen-tencing, such disparities persist in large part due to plea bargaining (e.g., Farrell and Ward 2011, Shermer and Johnson 2010). Sentences derived through negotiations are necessarily void of con-siderations of punishment philosophies such as retribution or deterrence. The odds of disparate sentences across similar cases are greater without guiding philosophies. The common observa-tion in related studies that sentences are more severe when defendants are convicted by juries as opposed to guilty pleas is the most obvious evidence of sentencing disparity (Tiffany et al. 1975), but even among defendants who plead guilty there is reason to believe that disparities will exist based on Alschulers observations regarding factors that influence the magnitude of a deal (i.e., the defense attorneys stubbornness to engage in negotiations, amount of time since formal charges were initially filed, and the amount of evidence against a defendant). None of these considerations have anything to do with sentences dictated by legal statutes, yet they are fundamental to determining the sentences of roughly 95 percent of all convicted felons in the United States. Alschuler provided a very cynical view of a process that has become even more prevalent since he wrote. The various perversions of justice he described are important nonethe-less and have contributed to a relatively broad literature on legal cynicism, even if policy makers have since ignored his original observations.
References
Casper, J. (1972). Criminal Courts: The Defendants Perspective. Washington, DC: National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice.
Eisenstein, J., and H. Jacob (1977). Felony Justice: An Organizational Analysis of Criminal Courts. Boston: Little, Brown.
Farrell, A., and G. Ward (2011). Examining District Variation in Sentencing in the Post-Booker Period. Federal Sentencing Reporter 23:31825.
Heumann, M. (1978). Plea Bargaining: The Experiences of Prosecutors, Judges, and Defense Attorneys. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mather, L. (1979). Plea Bargaining or Trial? The Process of Criminal Case Disposition. Boston: Lexington Books.
Packer, H. (1967). The Limits of the Criminal Sanction. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP.
Rubinstein, M., and T. White (1979). Alaskas Ban on Plea Bargaining. Law and Society Review 13:36783.