Too Young to Plead? Risk, Rationality, and Plea Bargaining's Innocence Problem in Adolescents

The overwhelming majority of both adult and adolescent convictions occur as the result of guilty pleas rather than trial. This means that convictions are often the result of decisions made by defendants rather than jurors. It is therefore important to study decision making in defendants to ensure convictions are occurring in a fair and principled way. Research suggests that the current plea-bargaining system is leading innocent defendants to systematically plead guilty to crimes that they did not commit, and that this may be more widespread in adolescents than adults. The current study uses fuzzy-trace theory to develop and test an explanation of why adolescents are more likely than adults to plead guilty to crimes they did not commit. The authors show that, as predicted, adolescents are more likely than adults to plead guilty when they are innocent, and that this is due to developmental differences in the use of gist representations in decision making whereby values are unlikely to be retrieved and applied when making decisions. These results have implications for postconviction claims of innocence by adolescents, procedural rules governing adolescent plea bargaining, and the practice of adolescent plea bargaining more generally.