When Justice Goes Virtual, Is It Just?

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, courts across the United States moved in-person hearings to virtual hearings within a matter of days. The transition heavily impacted criminal defendants, whose cases overnight depended on video conferences. As COVID-19 cases rose, so did the number of defendants pleading guilty, raising serious due process concerns across the country (Baldwin et al., 2020).

The Sixth Amendment guarantees that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury” (U.S. Const. amend. VI). But a defendant can waive that right and instead reach a formal agreement with prosecutors—a plea, in which the defendant states their guilt on the record. Deciding whether to accept a plea bargain or go to trial is not a decision anyone should make quickly; it takes time to think through, because the consequences follow a person for years.

In “Quick and Dirty: An Evaluation of Plea Colloquy Validity in the Virtual Courtroom”, Wilford, Frazier, Lowe, Newsome, and Strong (2025) examined the format and content of virtual hearings that ended in criminal convictions. The researchers gathered 340 plea colloquies that courts had recorded and posted publicly between October 2020 and January 2023, set aside 106 involving only civil infractions, and analyzed the remaining 234. They found that virtual hearings are highly efficient but inconsistent. Judges were visible in all 234 cases, meaning their faces were always in frame. Prosecutors, by contrast, were visible in 62% of cases, defense attorneys in 72%, and defendants in 85%. From a defendant's perspective, that pattern is cause for concern: the attorneys on both sides were less visible during these proceedings than the defendants themselves.

The colloquies also averaged just 3.88 minutes. Think about that from a defendant's point of view—accepting that your plea hearing will last under four minutes. Would you be comfortable with that? In those few minutes, a judge has to establish on the record that the defendant has been identified and that the plea is knowing, voluntary, and intelligent. Yet the researchers found that judges explicitly asked whether a plea was knowing and intelligent in only 23 of 158 criminal cases, roughly 15% of the time. And what about the defendants—more than one in ten—who participated by audio only? How is a judge identifying them, or assessing whether they understand what they are giving up? How does the judge know the waiver of the Sixth Amendment right is truly voluntary? Questions like these leave the validity of our due process protections looking both questionable and inconsistent.

These recordings came from hearings that courts posted publicly online, most of them in Michigan district courts, so the picture is a partial one. Even so, the study helps us understand what happened when in-person hearings became virtual ones. As courts continue to rely on technology, it is worth making sure that defendants' constitutional rights are protected and that their hearings deliver the justice they are entitled to.

References

Baldwin, J. M., Eassey, J. M., & Brooke, E. J. (2020). Court operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 45, 743–758. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12103-020-09553-1

Wilford, M. M., Frazier, A., Lowe, A., Newsome, P., & Strong, H. V. (2025). Quick and dirty: An evaluation of plea colloquy validity in the virtual courtroom. Law and Human Behavior, 49(3), 311–322. https://doi.org/10.1037/lhb0000619