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American Law and Economics Review Advance Access originally published online on March 17, 2006
American Law and Economics Review 2006 8(1):116-142; doi:10.1093/aler/ahj005
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Law and Economics Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Does the Threat of the Death Penalty Affect Plea Bargaining in Murder Cases? Evidence from New York’s 1995 Reinstatement of Capital Punishment

Ilyana Kuziemko

Harvard University

Send correspondence to: Ilyana Kuziemko, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138; E-mail: kuziemko{at}nber.org.

This article investigates whether the death penalty encourages defendants charged with potentially capital crimes to plead guilty in exchange for lesser sentences. I exploit a natural experiment in New York State: the 1995 reinstatement of capital punishment, coupled with the public refusal of some prosecutors to pursue death sentences (N.Y. Penal Law § 125.25 [McKinney 1975]). Using individual-level data on all felony arrests in the state between 1985 and 1998, I find the death penalty leads defendants to accept plea bargains with harsher terms, but does not increase defendants’ overall propensity to plead guilty. A differences-in-differences analysis of a national cross-section of homicide defendants confirms these results.


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