Plea bargain
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A plea bargain (also plea agreement, plea deal or copping a plea) is an agreement in a criminal case in which a prosecutor and a defendant arrange to settle the case against the defendant. The defendant agrees to plead guilty (and often allocute) or no contest and in some cases to also provide testimony against another person in exchange for some agreement from the prosecutor as to the punishment. A plea bargain can also include the prosecutor agreeing to charge a lesser crime (also called reducing the charges), and dismissing some of the charges against the defendant. In most cases, a plea bargain is used to reduce the number of cases and their aggregate impact on the criminal justice system as the number of cases which can be actually tried by a court system is a fraction of the number of cases filed.
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[edit] United States
- See also: Federal Sentencing Guidelines
Plea bargaining is a significant part of the criminal justice system in the United States; the vast majority of criminal cases in the United States are settled by plea bargain rather than by a jury trial[1][2]. Plea bargains are subject to the approval of the court, and different States and jurisdictions have different rules. The Federal Sentencing Guidelines are followed in federal cases and have been created to ensure a standard of uniformity in all cases decided in the federal courts.
[edit] India
Plea bargaining was introduced in India by Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2005, which amended the Code of Criminal Procedure and introduced a new chapter XXI (A) in the code which is enforceable from January 11, 2006. This affects cases in which the maximum punishment is imprisonment for seven years; however, offenses affecting the socio-economic condition of the country and offenses committed against a woman or a child below the age of fourteen are excluded.
[edit] Other common law jurisdictions
In some common law jurisdictions, such as England and Wales, and Victoria, Australia, plea bargaining is permitted only to the extent that the prosecutors and the defense can agree that the defendant will plead guilty to some charges and the prosecutor will drop the remainder. The courts in these jurisdictions have made it plain that they will always decide what the appropriate penalty is to be. No bargaining takes place over the penalty.
[edit] Plea bargaining in civil law countries
Plea bargaining is extremely difficult in jurisdictions based on civil law. This is because unlike common law systems, civil law systems have no concept of plea — if the defendant confesses, that confession is entered into evidence, but the prosecution is not absolved of the duty to present a full case. A court may decide that a defendant is innocent even though he presented a full confession. Also unlike common law systems, prosecutors in civil law countries may have limited or no power to drop or reduce charges after a case has been filed, and in some countries their power to drop or reduce charges before a case has been filed is limited, making plea bargaining impossible. Furthermore, many civil law jurists consider the concept of plea bargaining to be abhorrent, seeing it as reducing justice to barter.
[edit] France
The introduction of a limited form of plea bargaining (comparution sur reconnaissance préalable de culpabilité or CRPC, often summarized as plaider coupable) was highly controversial in France. In this system, the public prosecutor could propose to suspects of relatively minor crimes a penalty not exceeding one year in prison; the deal, if accepted, had to be accepted by a judge. Opponents, most specifically attorneys and left-wing parties, argued that plea bargaining would gravely infringe on the rights of defense, the long-standing constitutional right of presumption of innocence, the rights of suspects in police custody, and the right to a fair trial. For instance, Robert Badinter argued that plea bargaining would give too much power to the public prosecutor, and would incite defendants to accept a sentence simply to avoid the risk of a bigger sentence in a trial, even if they did not really deserve it. Only a small minority of criminal cases are settled by CRPC: in 2005, out of 530000 decisions by correctional courts, only 21000 were CRPC.[3]
[edit] Estonia
Estonia is another country where plea bargaining has been introduced in the 90s allowing to reduce penalty in exchange for confession and avoiding most of the court proceedings. In that country plea bargaining is permitted for the crimes punishable by no more than 4 years of imprisonment. Normally one fourth reduction of penalty is given.[citation needed]
[edit] Italy
In Italy, the procedure of pentito (litt. "he who has repented") was first introduced during the "years of lead" for counter-terrorism purposes, and generalized during the Maxi Trial against the Mafia in 1986-1987. The procedure has been contested, as since pentiti received lighter sentences as long as they supplied information to the magistrates, they have been accused, in some cases, of deliberately misleading the Italian justice.
[edit] Criticisms
Some legal scholars argue that plea bargaining is unconstitutional because it takes away a person's right to a trial by jury. In fact, Justice Hugo Black once noted that, in America, the defendant “has an absolute, unqualified right to compel the State to investigate its own case, find its own witnesses, prove its own facts, and convince the jury through its own resources. Throughout the process, the defendant has a fundamental right to remain silent, in effect challenging the State at every point to ‘Prove it!’” By limiting the powers of the police and prosecutors, the Bill of Rights safeguards freedom.[4]
Plea bargaining is also criticized, particularly outside the United States, on the grounds that its close relationship with rewards, threats and coercion potentially endangers the correct legal outcome.[5] Coercive plea bargaining has been criticized on the grounds that it infringes an individual's rights under Article 8 of the UK's Human Rights Act 1998.[6]
The theoretical work based on the Prisoner's dilemma is one reason why, in many countries, plea bargaining is forbidden. Often, precisely the Prisoner's dilemma scenario applies: it is in the interest of both suspects to confess and testify against the other suspect, irrespective of the innocence of the accused. Arguably, the worst case is when only one party is guilty — here, the innocent one is unlikely to confess, while the guilty one is likely to confess and testify against the innocent.
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[edit] External links
- Plea bargaining comes into effect-India Law: A new chapter - Chapter XXI A - on `plea bargaining' has been inserted in the Criminal Procedure Code (1973)
[edit] References
- ^ Plea Bargains Findlaw.com
- ^ Interview with Judge Michael McSpadden PBS interview, December 16, 2003
- ^ Les chiffres-clés de la Justice, French Ministry of Justice, October 2006
- ^ http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv26n3/v26n3-7.pdf, Regulation Magazine, Fall 2003
- ^ Times Online, November 28, 2007
- ^ Out-law News, February 16, 2007
