Doesn plea bargaining distort the data?
It’s actually more likely to be the other way around – that trial results “distort” the data, as plea bargains account for the great majority of convictions. There are countless individual variations whether or not we limit our criminal history data to trial results. Even if we only draw data from trial results, we still do not distinguish, for example, accomplice or accessory liability from principal liability. The same is true of “culpability” facts which do not rise to a successful defense (duress or mutual combat or hungry children or addiction), and a case can be made for the notion that plea bargaining is better than verdicts at sorting these out. At this point, there’s no reason to assume that the variations in how a given fact scenario translates into a criminal history element skews the history differently in one slice of offenders than in another — the range of variations is presumably largely the same for all. Of course, we have much to learn, and we may discover distortion
