I have been working away on a short essay on plea bargaining in India which is now up on SSRN. Crudely put, 'plea bargaining' refers to a method where the accused pleads guilty to the crime, and this voluntary plea brings certain benefits in the form of a lenient sentence or conviction for offences that are less serious than the ones initially brought. In the paper, I explore why plea bargaining has become the dominant method of resolving criminal cases and then explain the Indian process. I try and explain the Indian criminal process to present it in contrast with the American model, and argue that the main reason why plea bargaining has failed to take-off in India (currently, less than 0.05% of all cases under the penal code are resolved by plea bargaining as per NCRB data) is the badly designed model that we have. The paper does not address the argument of whether plea bargaining is a good or bad process, but I think my biases become evident through the paper.
The paper is consciously written in a way to make it accessible to anyone and not only lawyers. It is accessible here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3085659
Comments would be lovely.
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