Plea bargaining when juror effort is costly

Abstract

This is the first paper to integrate plea bargaining with costly juror effort. Jurors care about achieving a correct verdict, but experience costs in processing trial-relevant information. There are no fully separating equilibria, where only innocent defendants go to trial, or pooling equilibria, where innocent defendants falsely plead guilty. The first result has been found in literature which does not incorporate costly juror attention, and is thus robust to the inclusion of this phenomenon. The second is new (barring schemes involving post-trial review by external bodies) and shows that laws restricting very lenient plea bargains are unnecessary; costly, unverifiable attention combined with the Cho–Kreps intuitive criterion rules such bargains out in equilibrium, regardless of prosecutor preferences. I characterize feasible semi-separating equilibria that a prosecutor can induce. I also characterize the optimum plea offer for different possible prosecutor preferences. There is a tradeoff between court costs, verdict accuracy and the length of plea sentences. The model generates novel testable implications, and helps to resolve a puzzle noted by legal scholars—that defendants going to trial overwhelmingly opt for jury trials over bench trials, while bench trials, in fact, have a higher rate of acquittal. I perform some robustness checks.