Plea Bargains

Securing life with death

Some say we need the death penalty to secure confessions and plea deals to get life without parole. While this may seem to make sense, it isn’t necessarily so. States without the death penalty have some of the highest rates of inmates serving life without parole, without ever having to use execution as a bargaining chip. Most prosecutors consider such use of the death penalty unethical anyway, and for good reason – it’s just one more cause of wrongful convictions.

States don’t need the threat of death to get life

"Eliminating the death penalty will have no negative impact on community, police, victim, or prison safety. It will not hinder the prosecutorial capacity to seek, or the court’s ability to impose, ‘life without parole’ sentences for serious, heinous crimes and criminals"

— Scott Harshbarger, former District Attorney and former Attorney General of Massachusetts, which has no death penalty

  • States without the death penalty have some of the highest rates of prisoners serving life without parole in the country – proving that you don’t need the death penalty to secure a life without parole sentence. Massachusetts, which has no death penalty, has one of the highest percentages of prisoners serving life without parole sentences in the nation. Indeed, three of the top five states in the nation are states without the death penalty. 1
  • Prosecutors in New Jersey say that abolition of the death penalty there in 2007 has made no difference in their ability to secure guilty pleas.
  • During the ten years New York had a death penalty, prosecutors secured plea bargains at a higher rate in second-degree murder cases than in first-degree murder cases. If the death penalty played a key role in securing pleas, the opposite would be true, since death was always an option in first-degree murder cases.
  • In Alaska, plea bargaining was abolished completely in 1975. A 1980 study by the National Institute of Justice found that since the end of plea bargaining, “guilty pleas continued to flow in at nearly undiminished rates. Most defendants pled guilty even when the state offered them nothing in exchange for their cooperation.”

Death as a threat risks convicting the innocent

"We have not viewed [abolition] as an impediment in the disposition of murder cases…As a practical matter, we have really seen no difference in the way we conduct our business in prosecuting murder cases."

— Edward Defazio,
Prosecutor, Hudson County, NJ

  • Many people sentenced to life and later found innocent were originally threatened with the death penalty and accepted a guilty plea and a life sentence in order to avoid an execution. These men are the walking evidence that plea bargaining with the death penalty is not only unethical, it is downright dangerous.
  • It’s hard to imagine that an innocent person would confess to crimes they did not commit. But false confessions occur more often than we realize, especially when a suspect is under duress or trying to avoid a harsher punishment like death.
After the 1985 rape and murder of Helen Wilson in Beatrice, Nebraska, six people were threatened with the death penalty.  Five pled guilty and four of them confessed in order to avoid execution.  The “Beatrice 6” spent over two decades behind bars for a crime they did not commit.  The Governor and Attorney General of Nebraska finally granted them pardons in 2009, after DNA tests proved they were innocent.
Chris Ochoa was sentenced to life for the 1988 rape and murder of Nancy DePriest in Austin, Texas. He was threatened with the death penalty. On the advice of his attorney, he pled guilty to the murder and fingered his friend, Richard Danziger, for the rape. In 2001, DNA testing revealed that both Ochoa and Danziger were innocent. They were exonerated and released from prison, but Danziger never really got his life back – he was severely beaten in prison and remains brain damaged to this day, in the care of his sister.
In 1991, the state of Maryland threatened Anthony Gray with the death penalty for a murder in Calvert County. He confessed to the crime to avoid execution and was sentenced to life, even though neither DNA nor fingerprints matched him or his co-defendants. Gray spent eight years in prison – including a year and a half after the real killer had been found and convicted – before he was exonerated and freed.

Life and death are too important to be used as a bargaining chip. The death penalty’s many flaws don’t go away when the aim is securing a life sentence. Indeed, the risks only increase when innocent people are coerced to confess in order to spare their own lives.

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  1. From about 1995 to 2004, 47% of second degree murder cases were resolved through plea bargains, compared to only 41% of first degree murder cases.