I'm not sure how much the UK is a good counterexample; the author of this paper seems to treat is as more similar to the United States than to the civil law systems like Germany (he commonly refers to the "Anglo-American" practice of plea-bargaining). Indeed, he holds up the UK's high rates of plea bargaining as proof that the cause of the oddities of the American system is the adversarial trial procedure that characterizes common law systems.
Plea bargaining in the UK is very different though, the bargain is around pleading to some charges to get others dropped - with the judge determining the sentence.
And with sentencing guidelines published for all common offences the prosecutor is not able to threaten you with massive sentences because you (or your lawyer) can know what the likely outcome is. For a first time offender the odds of jail for almost any offence is low.
The quality of legal representation provided, especially in trials facing major jail time is significantly better. For a big case you will have a Queens Council barrister defending you who is just as experienced as the prosecutor.
And finally the Crown Prosecution Service is far less interested in the sentence than it is in the successful outcome. In other words their statistics look just as good if you plead to one very minor charge compared to several major ones. So plea bargaining here is much more about reducing their workload than it is in scoring political points.
If you are truly innocent (or believe yourself to be in the case of Aaron) then trusting then plea bargains are not for you in the UK.
This is very English-centric, for what it's worth. Plea bargains are an oddity under English law (they don't exist elsewhere in the UK), and the CPS is equally English.
Apart from that about plea bargains, it does mostly hold true in Scotland/NI.
Indeed, he holds up the UK's high rates of plea bargaining...
I am not sure you read the same paper as anyone else. Nowhere did I see this. In fact, the author more or less said the exact opposite on page 215. Also, this paper is dated 1979.
Plea negotiation, let alone plea bargaining, is rare in the UK. The UK government only in the last decade began to accept the use of plea bargaining in corporate crime. Occassionally, plea negotiation can also occur, most commonly in co-conspirator cases like gang assaults, but again this is uncommon.
To compare the absolutely routine use of plea bargaining in the US to their rarity in the UK would be well beyond a stretch.
Page 210:
"Plea bargaining has been documented in Eng-
land where crime rates are closer to German than to American
levels; the constant factor in both England and the United States is, of course, adversary criminal procedure."
All that's talked about on page 215 is that "in contemporary [1979] England, official ideology has been until lately loath to acknowledge the existence of plea bargaining," but that it is in fact well-documented (as an example showing that, if there were an unofficial plea bargaining system in Germany, it would be easy to discover by interviews of legal counsel).
I agree that the US is indeed a more extreme case (especially in not limiting plea bargaining to certain types of cases and openly accepting plea bargaining in principle), but this author clearly believes that the causative factor in both cases is the complexity of common law trial procedure (which, again, seems to have reached extremes in the US that are unmatched in the UK).
