| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

George Fisher. Plea Bargaining's Triumph: A History of Plea Bargaining in America. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 397. $65.00.
The prevalence of plea bargaining in today's criminal courtrooms might suggest that it is a timeless and necessary institution, one that has no predecessors and is likely to have no progeny. George Fisher challenges this assumption by deeply interrogating the practices and motives of the mid-nineteenth-century criminal court actors who came to rely on informal bargains in place of full adjudication as a mechanism of case disposition. But Fisher's project extends well beyond documenting the antecedents of this practice; he argues that because plea bargaining gained personal and institutional support from all corners of the criminal justice system during the second half of the 1800s, it achieved a dominance that virtually insured its longevity.	1
The book's argument unfolds over nine chapters and is derived largely from the author's meticulous examination of court records, prosecutors' records, informal court clerk files, and press accounts from mid to late nineteenth-century Middlesex County, Massachusetts. Fisher chose Middlesex as a case study for two reasons: he practiced criminal law there before becoming an academic, and he discovered that Middlesex has a treasure trove of records from this time period. To allay concerns that Middlesex might not be representative of trends throughout the United States, the author also briefly assesses similar documentation from New York, California, and England and concludes that data there confirm his theory.	. . .

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