A Plea Conviction Does Not Require a Guilty Plea

As noted in my first (In)Justice System entry, jury trials are on the verge of extinction. And, this decline in jury trials has coincided with an increase in plea convictions.

In this series of blog posts, I will cover the unknown cost of America’s new justice system—characterized by the Supreme Court as “a system of pleas, not a system of trials.”

A System of Pleas

Guilty pleas now account for approximately 95 percent of criminal convictions in the United States. More troublingly, they also account for a growing proportion of wrongful convictions. More than 20 percent of the wrongful convictions recorded by the National Registry of Exonerations were the result of false-guilty pleas.

Some scholars have argued that our increasing reliance on guilty pleas is unproblematic, stating simply that, “most people pleading guilty are, in fact, guilty.” This contention has resulted in arguably overly optimistic estimates concerning the rate of wrongful convictions in the United States (e.g., 0.027 percent cited by Justice Scalia, 0.016 to 0.062 percent proposed by former District Court Judge Cassell).

There are many reasons why such low wrongful conviction estimates should be met with skepticism. The first reason I will address in detail is the documented difficulty in overturning wrongful plea convictions.

Kerry Max Cook

Kerry Max Cook was convicted of the rape and murder of Linda Jo Edwards in 1978. When that conviction was overturned in 1988, he was retried in 1992. When that case ended in a mistrial, he was retried (a third time) in 1994: He was reconvicted and returned to death row.

His 1994 conviction was overturned two years later by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which noted that “… prosecutorial and police misconduct has tainted this entire matter from the outset.”

Cook was released on bail in 1997 (after 19 years on death row), and the State of Texas prepared to try him a fourth time. Leading up to the trial, the State offered Cook a series of pleas that would eliminate any future risk of a death sentence. Cook refused them all. Finally, the State offered him a plea deal that would not require him to admit guilt or return to prison. Having repeatedly faced possible death at the hands of the State for a crime he did not commit and having repeatedly witnessed State actors engage in misconduct to keep him imprisoned, Cook reluctantly agreed to this no-contest plea.

Source: Wild Squirrels/Shutterstock

Two months later, DNA test results of semen found on Edwards's underwear excluded Cook and matched the profile of a man with whom the victim had a locally notorious affair, James Mayfield, a man who had denied having had any sexual contact with Edwards for the approximately 3 weeks preceding her murder.

The (Un)Exonerated

Cook’s case is now one of six featured in the play, The Exonerated. It premiered off-Broadway in 2002 and was revived in 2012; it was also adapted into a made-for-television film. But, unfortunately, even as of 2012, Cook had still not been exonerated.

His latest murder conviction was overturned in 2016 (somewhat exonerating him), but the State refused to declare him “actually innocent.” As a consequence, Cook is still not included among the exonerees documented by the National Registry of Exonerations—the database that is often used to inform estimates regarding the prevalence of wrongful conviction.

Cook’s legal team, including members of The Exoneration Initiative, filed a brief on April 19 to, among other things, argue that Cook should be declared actually innocent of Edwards's murder. Notably, it has now been more than 20 years since crime-scene DNA excluded Cook and matched Mayfield (evidence typically considered exonerating).

Next month, we’ll address Cook’s latest brief in more detail.