Congratulations to Josie Reich, winner of the Percival W. Clement Prize. The Clement Prize is an American Studies prize awarded for the best senior thesis in support of the principles of the U.S. Constitution and the first ten amendments.
Josie’s thesis, “The Phantom Plea: How an Obscure Sentencing Tactic Misleads Defendants,” analyzes a sentencing phenomenon in which judges accept defendants’ guilty pleas and then impose sentences that bear no resemblance to the deals those defendants signed. Through interviews with legal scholars, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and incarcerated people, a research trip to a Delaware prison, and the first comprehensive survey of all fifty states’ plea bargaining laws, Josie traces the gap between what defendants expect and what the law actually guarantees.