What is it about?
When criminal defendants plead guilty, judges must scrutinize the validity of their decisions in hearings called colloquies. Many courtrooms moved to virtual hearings during COVID-19, and virtual hearings continue today. We evaluated 234 of these virtual hearings, noting their brevity (< 4 minutes), limited consistency in validity inquiries, and frequent audio-only defendant participation (which raised doubts about defendants’ identities and states of mind).
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Why is it important?
The US criminal legal system is increasingly reliant on defendants pleading guilty to their crimes (~95% of criminal convictions are pleaded). To defend this shift, the legal system presumes that criminal defendants are waiving their constitutional rights (e.g., to a trial) knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily. But, the results of the current study put those presumptions into doubt at least when it comes to our observed sample of virtual plea colloquies.
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This page is a summary of: Quick and dirty: An evaluation of plea colloquy validity in the virtual courtroom., Law and Human Behavior, June 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/lhb0000619.
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