Plea bargaining does not occur in a vacuum. There are several actors (e.g., prosecutors, defense attorneys, defendants) directly involved with plea negotiations and plea decisions. As approximately 95 percent of state and federal convictions result from guilty pleas, the decision-making process that defendants and other actors undergo during plea negotiations is important to understand. This chapter will address the unique and overlapping theoretical, practical, cognitive, and social influence factors that underlie the plea negotiation process and ultimate plea decision. Specifically, this chapter will focus on negotiations – particularly how attorneys approach negotiation ideologically and practically – and the power dynamics present when two or more actors attempt to influence each other. Furthermore, we will discuss the basic social (e.g., obedience to authority) and cognitive (e.g., heuristics) processes that drive defendant decision-making when interacting with prosecutors and defense attorneys. Finally, policy implications and future directions for research will be discussed throughout the chapter.

This chapter addresses decision-making about the restoration of defendants who are adjudicated as incompetent to stand trial (IST) in an era in which there has been deemed a competency crisis that the number of impacted defendants has grown significantly. It describes the rationale for the importance of this topic and associated decisions, and provides the context for such decisions: hospital, jail, and outpatient. After reviewing the existing scientific literature on the frequency of restoration decisions and the duration and outcomes of relevant interventions, it describes a proposal for an approach to evaluating restorability that is more consistent with the available scientific evidence and a better fit for clinical and forensic practice. The chapter concludes with a more detailed discussion of both clinical and legal decisions in this area, elaborating on why this approach appears to offer a better fit for practice. Implications for future research, clinical and legal decision-making, and bias reduction are described.

Chapter 8 illuminates the intermediary stages of litigation before the early Tudor kings. It takes up the little-studied perspective of defendants in cases heard by the king’s Court of Requests and examines the potential for even this most authoritative kind of justice to be resisted. The chapter begins by studying the testimonies of messengers, recorded in Requests’ order books, for evidence of accused parties evading or rejecting the initial summons into court. It then reconstructs the process by which defendants made formal answers to petitions, and outlines the arguments they raised in their own defence. In line with debates ongoing contemporarily in Parliament and Council, defendants’ answers often contrasted extraordinary royal justice with the due process enshrined in English law. These lines of contestation were crucial to the increasing definition of royal justice under the early Tudor regimes, this chapter argues.