Professor Josh Bowers’s article is a breath of fresh air. He exposes the tired, stale arguments of those who are opposed to false guilty pleas—i.e., guilty pleas of factually innocent defendants. He persuades that, to the extent that innocent defendants are harmed by the criminal justice process, it is not the fault of plea bargaining but, rather, failures in other parts of our justice systems, specifically failures at the points of arrest, charge, and the trial itself. In his words, “[t]he inevitable conclusion is that there may well be systemic innocence problems, but they are not problems with plea bargaining.”

I was surprised when I read Bowers’s article to learn that quite a few commentators, and even courts (on state law grounds), have rejected the analysis of the Supreme Court in North Carolina v. Alford. Not a single Justice in 1969 took the position that Alford should be forbidden to plead guilty on the ground that he claimed to be innocent. Justice Brennan’s short dissent did not reach the question of whether the Due Process Clause foreclosed an entry of a conviction based on a plea of guilty accompanied by a claim of innocence. The dissent merely read the record to show that Alford was so gripped by fear of the death penalty that his plea was involuntary.