The Case of Court Clog: How to Attack Plea Bargaining’s Top Argument

October 7th, 2025
Brogan Jones

There are few debate resolutions throughout the year that see as much confused Google searches, agitated gripes, and makeshift blockfiles thrown together the night before a tournament as the season opener. This year, to kick off the 2025-2026 season, the chosen LD topic was “Resolved: In the United States criminal justice system, plea bargaining is just.” Coming from someone who loved the topic at first, then hated it, then won a tournament with it, and now views it as a fairly middle-of-the-line resolution, I thought I would break down the argument that took up 95% of every single round that I debated and watched. Let’s dive into general strategies for how each side can win the clash over the argument that consistently landed the most ink on the flow. This argument is, of course, court clog.

Let’s start with what the affirmative argument of court clog truly is. It’s no surprise that court clog would be the main argument from the affirmative in most rounds. Especially with most aff cases on this topic opting for consequentialist frameworks, it’s one of the most diverse and highest-impact arguments, with strong evidential backing as well. Impacts can include pretrial detention, wrongful convictions, democracy, costs, stifling innovation, and even climate change. The link for how court clog happens is also very simple and intuitive for any judge to understand. Our system is reliant on plea bargains, evident by the fact that they make up 98% of cases. Without plea bargaining, this 98% would shift to trials. And, because trials are 51x longer than plea arrangements, the result would be clogged calendars, delaying justice and thus triggering all of the previously stated impacts. That’s the affirmative argument, in a nutshell.

As for good negative responses, I found that there were three main ways that were best for attacking/disproving court clog on the other side of the resolution. First, it’d be good to point out that plea bargaining does not result in an efficient system, but rather a fast one. If a system is efficient, that means that it is carrying out its intended purpose, but because the intended purpose of the criminal justice system is justice and the negative is obviously claiming that plea bargaining is not achieving justice, then the negative can make the claim that the current system isn’t efficient, it’s just fast, and a fast but cruel system is not a just one. The affirmative is obviously then going to argue that efficiency is important because it helps prevent the impacts that they outline, but that point will be addressed by the next two responses, which disprove that those impacts happen at all.

Second, you’ll want to point out that a decrease in plea bargaining has empirically not triggered court clog or its impacts. Prominent examples include Arizona and Iowa counties, which did not see an increase in trials and instead experienced increased efficiency. Of course, the affirmative could always answer with empirical evidence of their own, pointing out how sentencing processes increased under an Alaskan plea deal ban, but that would then likely come down to a clash over the scope of the implementation of each of those policies. Even if the clash gets messy over empirical examples, however, the third response to plea bargaining should still be enough to win court clog for the negative.

Thirdly, and the best response in my opinion, is that there are efficient alternatives to plea bargaining besides just having more trials. A common one that continuously got brought up in debates was bench trials, which are much shorter and expend less resources than jury trials, but still grant individuals more due process and prevent the coercion of plea bargains. A good example of bench trials working efficiently was in Philadelphia in the 1980s. While this is slightly outdated, you could argue that Philadelphia crime rates were even higher in the 1980s than they are now, and the system was still able to handle the high amount of cases without collapsing and without plea bargains. Because the entire affirmative link to court clog happening relies on this idea of the 98% of cases that result in plea bargains being replaced with jury trials, providing efficient alternatives is a very effective link takeout.

While this topic certainly has a lot of interesting potential points that I had a lot more fun arguing than court clog (like inequality, rights violations, informants and organized crime, wealth and Epstein, among others), it is essential to know how to respond to court clog, as there wasn’t a single round that I debated or spectated that it wasn’t one of the affirmative’s main arguments. Most rounds on this topic were either won or lost by how the court clog clash played out. While it’s certainly a strong argument to make on the aff, there are several ways to respond to it. Aside from criticizing the sole goal of efficiency and empirically disproving that a decrease in plea bargains causes court clog, the negative can provide efficient alternatives to just having more jury trials, which helps neutralize the affirmative argument.