Scenes of jurors filing into the jury box, handing the verdict to the court, and its reading—the suspenseful moments of television crime dramas—in reality are a rarity these days. Contrary to Hollywood’s fictionalized vision of our criminal justice system, a recent report from the National Association for Criminal Defense Lawyers confirms what many have recognized: trials are an endangered species. In most cases, resolution via a guilty plea is a foregone conclusion: fewer than three percent of federal criminal cases are resolved by a trial. This phenomenon is often described by jurists and practitioners as “the vanishing trial.”

The NACDL Report, titled “The Trial Penalty: The Sixth Amendment Right to Trial on the Verge of Extinction and How to Save It,” is a thorough and thoughtful examination of the disappearing federal criminal trial and its primary cause, the “trial penalty”—the substantial difference between the sentence a defendant will receive when pleading guilty prior to trial versus the sentence that defendant will receive after trial. The Report concludes: “There is ample evidence that federal criminal defendants are being coerced to plead guilty because the penalty for exercising their constitutional [trial] rights is simply too high to risk.”