Four Models of Victim Involvement during Plea Negotiations: Bridging the Gap between Legal Reforms and Current Legal Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, there has been a clear trend towards recognizing the right of victims to participate more fully in the criminal justice process. In Canada, significant steps have been taken to ensure that victims are granted the right to participate formally in the sentencing and parole processes through the use of victim impact statements. However, to date, comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of whether or not victims should be accorded a meaningful role in the process of plea negotiations. In Canada, plea bargaining has not been officially recognized and has not been subjected to judicial supervision. Indeed, plea negotiations occur behind closed doors, and victims have no right of participation. In the United States, however, plea agreements require judicial approval, and, in certain state jurisdictions, victims are accorded the right of participation in the judicial hearings that are held to determine whether or not a proposed plea agreement should be accepted by the trial court. This article identifies four potential models for the participation of victims in the plea negotiation process in Canada. The recommended model requires that plea negotiations be officially recognized by the Parliament of Canada; that plea negotiations be subjected to judicial regulation; and that victims be granted the right to make oral or written presentations to the trial judge concerning their opinions about the terms, and ultimate acceptability, of any proposed plea agreement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.058 | 0.058 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".