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Plea Bargaining

Lotina Kelley

Intro to Criminal Court Systems/CJA224

July 24th, 2013

Shanese Rivera, J.D.

Plea Bargaining

Introduction

As we all know, anyone who commits a crime and gets caught will go to trial. Some defendants look to their attorney for a plea bargain. The defendants rather enter a guilty plea if their defense attorney offers them a plea bargain instead of going to trial. If offered a plea bargain their sentence is most likely less than it would be if they were to go to trial. Not always do entering a plea bargain work out in the defendants favor. There are some advantages and disadvantages in doing so that will be later discussed in the paper. This paper will also talk about charge bargaining and sentence bargaining, the advantages of plea-bargaining for the prosecutor, defense attorney, judge, defendant, and victim, explain how prosecutors and defense attorneys can misuse plea-bargaining, discuss the disadvantages of plea-bargaining for the victim and defendant, and explain what the people who want to be “tough on crime” (Crime Control Model) and those who want to protect due process rights (Due Process Model) think about plea-bargaining.

What is a Plea Bargain?

Definition of Plea Bargain

According to Siegel, Schmalleger & Worrall the Black’s Law Dictionary gives this definition; plead bargaining is “the process whereby the accused and the prosecutor in a criminal case work out a mutually satisfactory disposition of the case subject to court approval [that] usually involves the defendant’s pleading guilty to a lesser offense or to only or some of the counts of a multicounty indictment in return for a lighter sentence than the possible for the graver charge” (2011). Simply stated, plea bargaining is when the defense attorney and the prosecutor come into an agreement of what the sentence should be without going to trial and the defendant usually plead guilty to a lesser offense....