St. John's University Law Faculty Blog

Professor Elayne Greenberg‘s article, Unshackling Plea Bargaining from Racial Bias, has been accepted for publication in Northwestern’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.  The article is a cross-disciplinary piece about the etiology and remediation of racial bias in plea bargaining.

Here is the abstract:

This article traces the origin of racial bias in plea bargaining by chronicling the historical relationship among three societal developments: the continuation of slavery, the development of our criminal justice system and the evolution of plea bargaining. The article then explains how the structure of plea bargaining as it is practiced today makes it more likely for historical racial biases to fester and manifest themselves. Culling from the research of cognitive psychologists, dispute system design scholars and anti-racism educators, this article prescribes organizational and procedural reforms to unshackle plea bargaining from racial bias.