Page "Jury trial" Paragraph 34

Some commentators contend that the guilty-plea system unfairly coerces defendants into relinquishing their right to a jury trial.

Others contend that there never was a golden age of jury trials, but rather that juries in the early nineteenth century ( before the rise of plea bargaining ) were " unwitting and reflexive, generally wasteful of public resources and, because of the absence of trained professionals, little more than slow guilty pleas themselves ," and that the guilty-plea system that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century was a superior, more cost-effective method of achieving fair outcomes.