Criminal Justice Unhinged: The Challenge of Guilty Pleas

The advent of reliance on guilty pleas creates a disparity between the legitimations of the criminal justice system and the current practices of the system that they are meant to legitimate. Despite the minority of convictions following criminal trials as a percentage of the overall conviction rate, it is trial, and especially jury trial, that still provides the focus for our legitimations. This article explores what legitimations are being, and might be, offered for reliance on guilty pleas, and how those legitimations could reorientate our legitimations for the criminal justice system more generally. In particular, it suggests how the presentation of the procedures of the modern criminal justice system as giving priority to the truth of convictions or the avoidance of wrongful conviction misrepresents that system, whose legitimation can be better represented by reference to the concepts of autonomy and the autonomous exercise of rights.