By the year 1860, the criminal justice system transformed from a court-centered system of public adjudication, dependent upon jury trials, to a police-centered system of private adjudication, dependent upon guilty pleas. By 1914, the first public and private defender agencies were established and the public relied more and more on guilty pleas and non-trial dispositions. The dominant theoretical perspective of most longitudinal research that, as trials became more complex and as the number of criminal cases increased, guilty pleas began to dominate as a means of facilitating the rapid disposition of the criminally accused. More recent research suggests that plea capitulation and the abandonment of jury trials have a much longer history than generally understood and that these changes relate to structural factors at the very core of the criminal justice process. This project will analyze the sociolegal context surrounding the abandonment of jury trials. The research will trace the historical underpinnings of the guilty plea system focusing on the structural factors which gave birth to the system more than fifty years prior to the establishment of institutional defense and the advent of modern case pressure. Through a detailed analysis of New York City's prosecution files between 1800 and 1900, previously unstudied trial transcripts, the Minute Book of the Court of General Sessions, and biographies of lawyers who appeared in criminal cases, the study will provide the first systematic account of the construction of criminal cases in the nineteenth century with a focus on the method of disposition. The analysis will explain how the ascendancy of the police in the evidence-gathering function and an increase in adversariness among lawyers combined to eliminate jury trials and to replace them with guilty pleas. The results of this research will increase understanding of the reasons for change in the disposition of criminal cases from one legal form to another. The analysis will consider whether the shift in legal form occurred because of internalized responses to the growth of business in courts or as a result of externally- generated pressures during a period in which there was profound change in the structure of society and the role of the state. Through such an historical analysis, important insights will be gleaned, both theoretically and practically, for understanding the present criminal justice system.
