How Plea Bargains Work

Most people picture a criminal case ending with a jury verdict. In reality, the plea bargain, not the trial, is how the system runs. The Supreme Court itself put a number on it in 2012: "Ninety-seven percent of federal convictions and ninety-four percent of state convictions are the result of guilty pleas." That line comes directly from the opinion in Missouri v. Frye, which sourced the figure to the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics. Two companion decisions handed down the same day, Frye and Lafler v. Cooper, are what govern a defendant's right to competent counsel during that process.

Frye: the duty to tell you about the offer

Galin Frye was charged with driving with a revoked license, a felony because of his prior convictions. The prosecutor sent his attorney plea offers, including one that would have resulted in a much shorter sentence. His attorney never told him about them, and the offers lapsed. Frye eventually pleaded guilty anyway, without a deal, and received a longer sentence than the one he never knew he had been offered.

The Supreme Court held that this was a Sixth Amendment problem. As the Court put it, "defense counsel has the duty to communicate formal offers from the prosecution to accept a plea on terms and conditions that may be favorable to the accused." A lawyer who lets a plea offer lapse without ever telling the client it existed has failed at a fundamental function of the job, not just made a strategic choice.

Lafler: what happens when bad advice costs you a better deal

Anthony Cooper faced a different problem. He was offered a plea deal of 51 to 85 months, but rejected it after his attorney gave him incorrect legal advice about his odds at trial. Cooper went to trial, was convicted, and received a mandatory minimum of 185 to 360 months, a far harsher outcome than the offer he turned down.

In Lafler v. Cooper, the Court held that a defendant in Cooper's position is entitled to a remedy when ineffective assistance of counsel causes them to reject a favorable plea and receive a harsher result at trial. But the remedy is not automatic reinstatement of the original sentence. Instead, the trial court has discretion: it can order the prosecution to reoffer the plea, and then decide whether to resentence the defendant according to the plea terms, resentence on only some counts, or leave the trial verdict and sentence undisturbed. Frye and Lafler extend the Sixth Amendment into plea negotiations, but they stop well short of guaranteeing that a rejected deal will simply be restored.

The debate the statistic feeds

The 97%/94% figure gets cited constantly, and by people arguing opposite things. Critics of the plea system, including public defenders and some academics, point to it as evidence that American criminal justice is, in language used in the Frye and Lafler opinions themselves, "a system of pleas, not a system of trials," where the fairness of the plea process matters more than trial-right protections that almost nobody actually uses. Prosecutors and some judges see the same number differently: a high plea rate, in their view, reflects quicker resolution of cases where the evidence is strong, not system-wide coercion of defendants into giving up rights they could otherwise exercise.

That disagreement is sometimes called the trial-penalty debate: whether the gap between a plea offer and a likely trial sentence, like the gap Cooper faced, pressures defendants into pleading guilty regardless of their actual guilt, or whether it simply reflects the normal benefit of accepting responsibility and sparing the system a trial. Frye and Lafler do not resolve that debate. What they establish is narrower and more concrete: whichever side of that argument a person is on, a defendant is constitutionally entitled to a lawyer who tells them about plea offers and gives them competent advice about whether to take one.