An Empirical Analysis of the Determinants of Guilty Plea Discount

In this report, I assess the application of the 2007 Sentencing Guidelines Council guideline, Reductions for a Guilty Plea, empirically using data collected on the Sentencing Council’s Crown Court Sentencing Survey in the year 2011. I begin by using an exploratory analysis to observe the relationship between the level of discount applied and the stage at which the guilty plea was entered. I then consider the possible impact of other factors taken into account when sentencing on the reduction applied for a guilty plea. For this, I specify different models for discrete data to regress the level of discount on a broad set of explanatory variables. Results point towards a substantial degree of agreement between the recommendations provided in the 2007 guideline and the actual level of discount received by offenders who plead guilty. In particular, the stage based approach recommended in the 2007 guideline was found to be the major factor determining the level of discount applied. However, the results also show there to be a number of departures from the guideline, such as: a) a high proportion of cases where the reduction given was higher than the maximum recommended level of 33%, with these anomalies concentrated in specific Courts; b) the presence of particular aggravating factors, on average, leading to lower levels of discount after controlling for the stage when the guilty plea was entered; and c) the presence of the mitigating factor remorse, on average, having a positive significant effect on the level of discount.