The Political Geography of Plea Bargaining in Federal Death Penalty Cases

In: New Mexico Law Review

Abstract

This Article employs the Breaking Bad counterfactual to motivate a preliminary empirical analysis of plea bargaining outcomes in federal capital cases. Given the Justice Department's express commitment to applying the federal death penalty uniformly across states, New Mexico's lack of a death penalty should be immaterial in determining whether Walt and other characters would have faced the federal death penalty. Nonetheless, scholars have demonstrated that there is considerable geographic variation in the federal death penalty's administration. Moreover, scholars have devoted considerable attention to illuminating the "[s]ignificant federalism and state sovereignty issues lurk[ing] beneath the surface of a nationally uniform federal death penalty."