<Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This article is an orphan, as no other articles link to it . Please introduce links to this page from related articles; try the Find link tool for suggestions . (February 2009) </Td> </Tr> <P> In The United States criminal justice system, a Courtroom Workgroup is an informal arrangement between a criminal prosecutor, criminal defense attorney, and the judicial officer . This foundational concept in the academic discipline of criminal justice recharacterizes the seemingly adversarial courtroom participants as collaborators in "doing justice ." The courtroom workgroup was proposed by Eisenstein and Jacob in 1977 to explain their observations of the ways courts, especially lower level courts, actually come to decisions . </P> <P> Because the courtroom workgroup deviates from the public consensus of how justice works, it has developed a deviant set of rules to continue its work and facilitate daily life for its participants . The academic theory of the courtroom workgroup has four cornerstone concepts that recognize this fact: Speed, Pragmatic Cynicism, Collegiality, and Secrecy . Efficient courtroom workgroups seek to process cases rather than dispense justice . This has been confirmed to greater and lesser extents in different courts . Defendants are assumed to be guilty . The procedural merits of the case are the true determinative factors of an outcome . Prosecutors and defense attorneys engage in a comparison of charges against possible procedural flaws and possible defenses to arrive at the going rate for a crime . These factors are used to determine how much punishment the plea bargain will offer . For example, group relationships and the desire to "maintain" a healthy working relationship are important to group members . The workings of the courtroom group and the "going rate" for given crimes are not matters for public disclosure . Estimates can be given to clients, but usually couched in terms of the prosecution's willingness to negotiate . (Summarized by O'Connor, T.R., 2005) </P> <P> The courtroom workgroup is a mechanism for prosecutorial discretion . Various techniques are used to convince the defendant that the evidence against him or her is overwhelming . "Charge stacking" is a process by which police and prosecutors create a case with numerous charges or numerous instances of the same charge to convince the defendant that the risk of not pleading guilty is intolerable . The defendant may be convinced to plead guilty to a few of the charges in return for not being prosecuted for the remaining charges . </P>

The actors in the courtroom work group typically cooperate with one another