Exoneree Compensation and Endogenous Plea Bargaining: Theory and Experiment

Chulyoung Kim and Sang-Hyun Kim

No 2019rwp-158, Working papers from Yonsei University, Yonsei Economics Research Institute

Abstract: We provide a model of endogenous plea bargaining in which a prosecutor has discretion over her choice of plea bargains in response to a level of exoneree compensation mandated by the state. It is shown that an increase of the compensation may invite a sentence-maximizing prosecutor to offer a higher or lower plea bargain discount, depending on parameter values. We brought this model to the lab, finding that (i) when the exoneration process featured high accuracy, a higher level of exoneree compensation induced no significant change in the average plea bargain discounts but still reduced the number of innocent pleas without affecting the number of guilty individuals pleading guilty, and (ii) when the exoneration process was plagued with low accuracy, a higher level of exoneree compensation increased the average plea bargain discounts but had no significant influence on the number of innocent and guilty individuals pleading guilty. These findings suggest that exoneree compensation could be an effective policy tool in reducing innocent pleas and wrongful convictions when combined with accurate exoneration processes, and that a statute for exoneree compensation could be effective even when one cannot expect coordination between the prosecution office and the state legislative.

Keywords: exoneree compensation; plea bargain; wrongful conviction; exoneration process (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 K14 K41 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37pages
Date: 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-ore
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://121.254.254.220/repec/yon/wpaper/2019rwp-158.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Exoneree Compensation and Endogenous Plea Bargaining: Theory and Experiment (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:yon:wpaper:2019rwp-158

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from Yonsei University, Yonsei Economics Research Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by YERI ().