Bargaining for Justice: The Road towards Prosecutorial Accountability in the Plea Bargaining Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
additional charges against two accused if they refused to enter guilty pleas.4 Despite the lower courts' acknowledgment that the prosecutor's conduct was unacceptable and despite the call from the trial judge to grant a stay of proceedings, the majority of the Supreme Court refused to justify that stay or provide any other remedies for this misconduct.5 Even though the prosecutor's "bullying tactic" was "reprehensible and unworthy of the dignity of her office," 6 Justice Moldaver, writing for the Majority, ultimately denied the accused's appeal.Considering the manner in which the lower courts characterized the prosecutor's conduct (as an abuse of process) and mindful of the strongly worded dissent from Justice Abella, the Majority's opinion arguably stands for the acceptance, albeit reluctantly, of behaviour that should not have been condoned as well as a resultant dilution of standards that should have been applied in order to guard against injustice.7 Situations of prosecutorial misconduct, like the one presented in Babos, raise serious questions about the role of prosecutorial discretion in the criminal justice system generally and the plea bargaining process more specifically.For all of the alleged benefits that come with prosecutorial discretion-such as flexibility, scarce resource maximization, and individualized justice 8 -there remains the "very real potential for pernicious use and abuse of this discretion."9 This article focuses on the place of prosecutorial discretion in the specific context of plea bargaining in Canada and asks whether and to what extent prosecutorial discretion ought to be guided and constrained to promote the principles of procedural fairness, accountability, flexibility, and transparency.Considering that between 2008 and 2009, fifty-nine percent of accused persons appearing before Canadian accused, but also victims, witnesses, counsel, and the administration of justice generally" (Ontario, Attorney General's Advisory Committee on Charge Screening, Disclosure, and Resolution Discussions, Report of the Attorney General's Advisory Committee on Charge Screening, Disclosure, and Resolution Discussions (Toronto: Ministry of the Attorney General, 1993) at 281 [Martin Report]. 4 Babos, supra note 1. See review of the facts at paras 7-18.5 For a review of the judicial history, see ibid at paras 19-28.
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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 | 0.093 | 0.154 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
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".