The Exercise of Constitutional Rights, a Crime Punishable by Death

31 Pages Posted: 24 Apr 2017 Last revised: 2 Jun 2017

See all articles by Alexandra Bruce

Alexandra Bruce

University of Mississippi, School of Law

Date Written: April 19, 2017

Abstract

Coerced, involuntary confessions are constitutionally barred. All interrogations and plea negotiations must be maintained absent any threats. Death is different. Prosecutors throughout the United States acknowledge the continued practice of leveraging plea negotiations with the threat of execution.

A small fraction of death penalty trials result from the prosecution’s pursuit of the death sentence. Many of the nation’s most notorious serial killers escaped the death penalty by simply accepting a guilty plea. Those prosecutors who adamantly support the death penalty, seeking the sentence in every case in which it is available, are overwhelmingly amenable to abandoning the sentence in exchange for the defendant’s guilty plea. In these negotiations, the defense counsels’ legal strategy centers on saving their client’s life. Legal ethics mandate defense attorneys counsel defendants to accept any offer to avoid the death penalty. This exposes the growing number of guilty pleas accepted for the sole purpose of avoiding death.

The Court recognizes the practice of threatening a defendant’s life with the death penalty as constitutionally valid. Defendants maintain a voluntary choice to plead guilty and avoid the death penalty. These defendants’ guilty pleas are products of voluntary and intelligent choices between the alternatives. This interpretation effectively permits prosecutors, who leverage capital plea bargains with death, to avoid any liability for coerced confessions.

This increased practice is problematic as it both undermines the purpose of the death penalty, and forces the forfeiture of constitutional rights contingent on escaping death. Employing the death penalty to encourage guilty pleas proves an unreasonable burden on defendants’ Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights. These plea negotiations result in penalizing defendants for the refusal to plead guilty, rather than for the commission of the particular crime.

Immense public policy concerns evolve from both enabling defendants, guilty of the most heinous crimes, to avoid the harshest sentence through pleading; and encouraging false confessions from defendants merely attempting to escape a death sentence. This plea bargaining practice conveys both an impermissible improper influence forcing the pleas constitutionally involuntary under the Fifth Amendment, and serves as an unreasonable burden on the defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights.

This article is the first to scrutinize prosecutors’ use of the death penalty in plea negotiations congruent to the lacking recourses available to try death penalty cases. Encouraging defendant’s to accept a guilty plea in order to avoid a sentence in which the prosecution lacks the recourses to procure conveys an impermissible false threat. Additionally, this academic article serves as a unique analysis of the effects of plea bargaining in capital cases to penalize the exercise of constitutional rights rather than the commission of a particular crime. The pleas prove overly burdensome to the constitutional rights of capital defendants.

Keywords: Death Penalty, Plea Bargaining, Prosecution, Life Without Parole, Sixth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, coercive pleas, involuntary confession

Suggested Citation

Bruce, Alexandra, The Exercise of Constitutional Rights, a Crime Punishable by Death (April 19, 2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2955315 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2955315

Alexandra Bruce (Contact Author)

University of Mississippi, School of Law ( email )

MS 38677
United States

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