Should plea bargaining include the right to confront witnesses?
In a criminal justice system centered around the plea bargain, the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause should apply to plea bargains as well as trials, according to a forthcoming essay in the Columbia Law Review. “A defendant’s trial rights come bundled—he must take them all, by going to trial, or leave them all, by pleading guilty,” wrote William Ortman, an assistant professor at the Wayne State University School of Law. The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment grants defendants the right to question witnesses testifying against them, but the clause has only been interpreted to apply to defendants who proceed to a trial. In his paper, titled Confrontation in the Age of Plea Bargaining, Ortman argued this is severely restricting in the United States, where only 5 percent of cases end up going to trial. Some 97 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of state cases end are resolved with a guilty plea negotiated before a trial is ever held. “There is no good reason to design a rule that accomplishes its mission in a small fraction of the cases and leaves the others untouched,” Ortman wrote. Ortman proposed that instead of only applying to trials, the limitation of the Confrontation Clause be changed to apply to “critical adjudication.” Trials would fall into this category, as would plea bargaining. Preliminary and pretrial hearings would not.