Can one judge fight the opioid crisis by wielding his or her power to deny plea deals? Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure grants judges unchecked discretion to deny a plea bargain, with no guidelines about which standards should be applied when making the decision to deny.1 Judges, however, rarely use this power.2 Recently, in United States v. Walker,3 a federal judge denied a plea deal in a drug case on the grounds that the bargain was against the public interest.4 He found that the public has an interest in participating in the criminal justice system through open jury trials5 and that “[t]he jury trial reveals the dark details of drug distribution and abuse to the community in a way that a plea bargained guilty plea cannot.”6 While the judge identified compelling concerns about the legal system’s reliance on plea bargains in the context of the opioid crisis, his solution — denying an individual plea bargain — neither meaningfully addresses the crisis nor adequately accounts for the impact on the defendant.
Starting in April 2016, the Metropolitan Drug Enforcement Network Team (MDENT) used confidential informants to “conduct seven controlled buys” of heroin and fentanyl from Charles York Walker.7 On July 14, 2016, MDENT arrested Mr. Walker.8 In September of the same year, he was indicted on three counts of distributing heroin and two counts of distributing fentanyl in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1),9 as well as one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1).10 Mr. Walker entered into a plea bargain: he would plead guilty to a separate single-count information of heroin possession with intent to distribute in violation of § 841(a)(1), and the government would move to dismiss the charges from the grand jury indictment.11 On January 26, 2017, Mr. Walker entered his plea in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia.12 Judge Goodwin accepted the guilty plea but deferred acceptance of the agreement until he could review the presentence investigation report.13
After reviewing the presentence investigation report, Judge Goodwin rejected the plea agreement on June 26, 2017.14 In explaining his reasoning for this rejection, the judge considered further factual background regarding the defendant. First, he discussed what he described as “a number of troubling facts regarding Mr. Walker’s criminal history and the criminal conduct at issue” that had become apparent in the report.15 These facts included a history of juvenile theft charges beginning at age thirteen, as well as convictions on eighteen charges as an adult, including three drug possession and two firearms charges.16 Judge Goodwin also documented the defendant’s history of illicit drug use17 and noted that the defendant, who appeared to be “engaged in a continuing drug dealing enterprise,”18 had mentioned to a confidential infor-mant “that some of [his] other purchasers had recently overdosed.”19
Moving on from the factual background, Judge Goodwin explained that the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure grant district judges broad, unguided discretionary power over plea bargains.20 He then laid out a scheme for assessing such bargains, asserting that the judge’s role in the process should include protecting democratic involvement in the criminal justice system. He explained that the United States is a “participatory democracy”21 and that participation must extend to the judicial system.22 If criminal cases are not brought to trial, the people are denied their right “to participate in the administration of the criminal justice system.”23 Thus judges must give “close consideration” to plea deals in order to vindicate “the people’s general interest in observing and participating in their government.”24
Judge Goodwin expressed extreme skepticism about what he described as the “primary justification” for plea bargaining: that courts and prosecutors are “overworked.”25 He explored the history of plea bargains in the United States, suggesting that they were “discourage[d]” prior to the Civil War26 but rose to prominence over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries because of “rising crime rate[s], limitations of local law enforcement resources, and busy dockets.”27 In 2015, only 2.9% of federal criminal cases went to jury trials.28 While acknowledging that there may once have been circumstances that made plea bargains “acceptable,” Judge Goodwin asserted that those circumstances no longer hold, at least in federal court, because courts and prosecutors “are no longer overburdened.”29 Concluding that the need to reduce the burden on courts and prosecutors is not currently pressing, the judge asserted that courts should examine plea agreements closely and reject them “upon finding that [they are] not in the public interest.”30
Judge Goodwin proposed a four-step process for making this public interest evaluation. The first step is to “consider the cultural context” of the criminal behavior.31 Here, that context is the national opioid crisis — heroin overdoses tripled between 2010 and 201432 — which Judge Goodwin called “one of the great public health problems of our time.”33 The crisis, he noted, is especially acute in West Virginia.34
The second step is to “weigh the public’s interest in participating in the adjudication” at hand.35 In this case, the judge explained, the exis-tence of the opioid crisis gave the public a “high interest” in participating in the adjudication of opioid-related crimes.36 He opined that members of the jury would come away from the trial more informed about the inner workings of the opioid crisis and that the media attention jury trials engender could highlight “that such conduct is unlawful and that the law is upheld and enforced.”37
The third step in Judge Goodwin’s approach tasks courts with considering whether, given the nature of the crime at hand, denying a public jury trial would prevent necessary “community catharsis” from occurring.38 He did not explore this point deeply in relationship to Mr. Walker’s case, simply stating: “The crimes alleged in Mr. Walker’s indictment involve heroin and other opioids and are ‘vicious criminal acts.’”39
The fourth and final step asks judges to consider whether the plea agreement appears to be motivated by a desire to “advance justice” or instead by simple expediency.40 Here, he noted that the plea agreement traded five counts of distribution and one firearms charge for a single distribution charge, concluding: “The principal motivation appears to be convenience.”41 In sum, he found “the plea agreement [not to be] in the public interest” and rejected it.42
Judge Goodwin’s analysis raises a compelling and oft-overlooked point about the public’s interest in jury trials as a matter of democratic involvement in the government, especially during an acute social crisis. But the problem he identified is not well addressed by the remedy he offered. Public ignorance of the opioid crisis cannot be meaningfully mitigated through the denial of a plea bargain. Furthermore, his framework ignores the defendant’s interest in being able to negotiate a lower sentence through a plea bargain, leading to an arbitrary denial of choice for defendants like Mr. Walker, with little if any public benefit accruing to justify the tradeoff.
In focusing on the effect of plea bargains against the backdrop of the opioid epidemic, Judge Goodwin’s inquiry puts a novel spin on the public interest concerns that have traditionally been evoked concerning plea bargains43 and open trials,44 creating a unique public harm argument against the general use of such bargains in the context of crimes relating to public health crises. One of his primary arguments for proceeding to trial is the informative value of such a trial for the public. But unlike other thinkers who have emphasized the educational value of trials,45 Judge Goodwin does not seem primarily concerned with the public learning about the criminal justice system. Instead, he envisions a trial as a platform for informing the populace about the details of how the opioid crisis actually operates.46 Similarly, the public catharsis that jury trials offer is normally suggested to be particularly important for “shocking” crimes, so as to prevent the people from resorting to mob justice.47 While, in Walker, Judge Goodwin gestured at heroin distribution as being particularly “vicious,”48 he never attempted to argue that low-level drug dealing is on par with the horrific, violent crimes that the public catharsis arguments for open jury trials normally envision. Instead, his opinion is grounded in a concern that allowing drug distribution charges to be settled in “the shadows of . . . private meeting[s] in the prosecutor’s office”49 robs members of the community of the opportunity to learn about and seek justice brought for the hundreds of small crimes that slowly chip away at their health and safety.
But Judge Goodwin neglected to truly grapple with the ways in which he, as a judge with power over only the plea bargains that he oversees, is ill-situated to address the public interest issues he raises. Judge Goodwin’s concerns are not with the leniency or content of a particular bargain but rather with the aggregate effect of having almost every case settled without a trial. The latter is a systemic problem that cannot be convincingly addressed by the actions of a single judge. Even if Judge Goodwin intends to deny every plea that comes before him in opioid-related cases — a policy he did not officially announce in this decision but that might be suggested by his promise to “carefully scrutinize” such bargains50 and his subsequent denial of a plea agreement in a similar case51 — he is only one federal district judge, in a state with nine other federal district judges52 and seventy-four state court trial judges.53 It may very well be that if many or all such crimes were dealt with through open trial the public as a whole could be educated and experience catharsis thanks to exposure through jury service and media coverage. But Judge Goodwin cannot achieve that effect alone: rather, it would require a statewide (or at least community-wide) policy against plea bargains in opioid-related cases.
Not only is Judge Goodwin’s ability to address the opioid crisis limited, but by attempting to solve a systematic problem through a single trial, his decision is also ultimately unfair to Mr. Walker, a reality Judge Goodwin ignored by neglecting to make room in his analysis to consider the impact of the denial of the plea bargain on the individual defendant. His structure focuses only on the public’s interest in a jury trial as weighed against the “expediency”54 rationale for plea bargains, which he sees as particularly weak.55 What is not weighed is Mr. Walker’s interest in being able to take advantage of the plea bargaining system to negotiate a lighter sentence in the face of harsh mandatory minimums faced at trial.56 While Rule 11 does not create a right to have one’s plea bargain accepted, the reality is that such bargains are — for better or for worse57 — how most federal criminal cases resolve,58 a fact that judges should not ignore when evaluating the consequences of denying a bargain. Indeed, normally when such bargains are denied, it is because the judge is concerned that the specific bargain is overly lenient given the particular crime committed by the particular defendant.59 Here, Mr. Walker found his choice to enter a favorable plea bargain denied, not because of his particular background or a particularly unique aspect of his crime,60 but because he happened to be in front of a judge who had decided to try to tackle the opioid crisis in this surprising manner. While some level of arbitrariness is inherent in a criminal justice system where individual judges are given great discretion, that does not excuse ignoring a defendant’s interests when determining whether to deny his or her bargain.
The public’s interest in jury trials during a time of crisis is certainly worthy of consideration, but the goals of education, democratic participation in governance, and community catharsis are best addressed by significant and uniform policy changes.61 As long as judges operate under a system in which plea bargains are the overwhelming norm, they must think carefully and holistically about whose interests they consider when exercising their power to deny plea bargains. While the public interest may be one useful factor to weigh, judges should be realistic about how much can be achieved through the denial of individual bargains, and they should remain attentive to the single individual at the center of their decision: the defendant.