Guilty pleas, which are the near-exclusive means of conviction for juvenile and adult defendants, must be entered knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily. The primary methods to determine whether these requirements have been met are through oral plea colloquies and written tender-of-plea forms. Despite their daily, widespread use and importance in safeguarding due process, almost no research has been conducted on these plea materials. The present research will address three questions: 1) Are defendants across differing states and age groups presented with similar components of plea materials and age-appropriate levels of understandability? 2) How are decisions to plead guilty influenced by plea understanding, guilt/innocence, age, and plea value? and 3) How do the rationales underlying plea decisions, regardless of the decisions themselves, differ by these factors?
To answer the first question, state and county-level tender-of-plea forms will be obtained, and subjected to detailed content and comprehensibility analyses. The second and third research questions will be addressed via a controlled laboratory study. Juveniles and adults will partake in a study in which guilt/innocence and plea value (comparatively good vs. fair deal) will be manipulated and adjudicative competence and plea understanding will be measured. The main outcome is willingness to plead guilty. Justifications behind plea decisions will also be examined by age, understanding, and condition.
Theoretical and practical knowledge will be gained about the situational and dispositional factors that influence plea decision-making. Researchers will provide insight into whether the content of plea materials is complete and comprehensible (and whether this differs by locale and age), the factors that can influence plea decisions and rationales, and the circumstances under which individuals take responsibility for acts they did and did not commit. Findings can have broad implications for juvenile and adult defendants, attorneys, scholars, and students. As social science is becoming more common in criminal courts, knowledge gained from this research has the potential to influence practice and policy, educate jurists, and safeguard rights.
The purpose of this research was to investigate the materials used by courts to ensure voluntary, knowing, and intelligent guilty plea decision-making, and to examine several factors that may influence such decision-making among juveniles and adults. Guilty pleas account for approximately 97% of convictions in state and federal courts. The first phase involved collecting written tender-of-plea forms from juvenile and adult courts and subjecting them to content and comprehensibility analyses. Tender-of-plea forms are the written version of judicial (oral) plea colloquies. Whereas oral colloquies are mandatory, the written forms are optional. Both aim to help ensure valid legal decision-making by reviewing defendants’ rights, the consequences of pleading guilty, etc. First, the forms were found to be significantly more available for use with adult defendants than juveniles. Thus, whereas adult defendants receive this important plea information in two modalities (oral and written), juveniles are more likely to receive the information in only one modality. Second, the forms were found to be largely incomplete and incomprehensible to the average defendant. For example, whereas both juvenile and adult defendants have been found to read at the 6th grade level, only 4.3% of the forms in our sample were understandable at this reading level. The second phase involved a laboratory study with youth and young adults from the community (aged 13 to 24 years). Participants were asked to imagine they were accused of a hypothetical robbery in which three factors were manipulated: guilt/innocence; the plea offer (an offer with or without a jail sentence); and comparative fairness (participants were either told it was a really good deal in comparison to what similar others get, or that it was a fair deal). Participants were also assessed on plea-related comprehension and their general legal understanding. Key findings concerning age group included that in comparison to adults, youth were more likely to plead guilty when innocent, but not when guilty, that youth were significantly less likely to understand and comprehend plea materials, and that youth and adults have differing rationales underlying their plea decisions. For example, in line with what is known about psychosocial development, youth were significantly less likely than adults to consider the short- and long-term consequences of the plea decision regardless of whether they chose to plead guilty or not guilty. Regarding guilt and innocence, as expected, the guilty were much more likely to plead guilty than the innocent. However, the study manipulations influenced decision-making differently by guilt-innocence status. Specifically, the addition of a jail sentence into the plea offer significantly reduced willingness to plead guilty among the guilty participants, but did not influence innocent participants. In contrast, innocent participants were affected by the comparative fairness manipulation, whereas guilty participants were not. Innocent participants were about 2.5 times more likely to plead guilty when told the offer was a comparatively good deal versus a fair deal. In regard to intellectual merit, new knowledge was gained with implications for several areas of empirical inquiry. First, there is an increasingly large literature demonstrating deficits in youths’ understanding of the legal system. The results from the present work demonstrate that youth, in comparison to adults, not only have deficits in the capacity to understand and appreciate legal information (i.e., legal competence) they can also be deficient in their actual decision-making. Second, understanding the circumstances under which people accept responsibility for crimes they did and did not commit has been an important area of recent research. Though most of the research has been in the police interrogation context, the current findings extend knowledge to a novel context. In large part, findings converge well with those from the police interrogation literature. For example, youth, a known risk factor for false confessions, was also found to increase the risk of false guilty pleas. In regard to broader impact, the findings from both studies have implications for juvenile and criminal courts. Although decisions to plead guilty are required to be knowing, intelligent, and voluntary, the results of both studies suggest that juveniles and adults alike either do not receive the requisite information or do not understand the information if given. Thus, present findings could be used to develop and ensure proper safeguards in the criminal justice system, a system which is now one of pleas. For example, because tender-of-plea forms were found to be largely incomplete and incomprehensible to the average defendant, the courts may want to revise their forms to be more in line with developmental capacities and knowledge.
