Empowered by years of tough sentencing-law changes in state legislatures and Congress, prosecutors have more muscle to extract guilty pleas from defendants and avoid trial. This article discusses those changes, but fails to address what is the single biggest incentive for a noncitizen to accept a plea deal: the threat of deportation.
Read the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/us/tough-sentences-help-prosecutors-push-for-plea-bargains.html