Tonight at Stanford d.school, we kick off our 5-session pop-up class on Redesigning Criminal Justice. We’re going to take a design-driven approach to innovation, meaning we’re taking a scoped problem area (the system of plea agreements), talking to several different kinds of stakeholders in the area, and then start to scout where there are opportunities for redesigns.
Tonight, our four teams will be interviewing defense attorneys & prosecutors about their perspective on plea agreements — how the process works right now, where the malfunctions & frustrations are, and how things might be better. We’ll also be hearing from Stanford Law Professor Robert Weisberg about the status quo of plea agreements, to make sure the teams are grounded in what the status quo is.
This is all part of the “UNDERSTANDING” phase at the beginning of the design process. The student teams are by no means experts in criminal justice — many are not even law students or lawyers.
Our teaching team has also created a website here for the class, that has lots of resources, interviews, videos, and articles presenting a myriad of perspectives on Plea Agreements, what’s wrong with them, and how they could be made better. If you have other resources to include — we want lots of different perspectives! — please pass them along.
