Pros And Cons Of Plea Bargaining

Plea bargaining, synonym to the plea agreement as a number would call it, is an agreement in a criminal case between a prosecutor and a defendant in a case, whereby the defendant complies to plead guilty to a specific charge and in return the prosecutor agrees to give the defendant some privilege. The defendant could plead guilty to a less serious charge or just to one of the many charges in exchange of dismissal for other charges. There are different types of bargaining such as plea, count, charge, and sentence bargaining. However, there is a contrast between charge bargaining and sentence bargaining. In charge bargaining, the defendant pleads guilty to a less serious case than the initial charge while in sentence bargaining, the defendant agrees to plead guilty acknowledging in advance what verdict will be given. Nonetheless, the verdict can still be altered with by the judge. Statistics show that over seventy percent of cases have been

Some of the pros include, plea bargaining assists the state and the court to deal with loads of cases presented to them. It also reduces the prosecutors’ work load by leaving the minor charges to settle through and give them the opportunity to work ahead of the more serious cases. It also enables for a less time-consuming and expensive trial as it restructures the accused to agree to the blame and submit themselves to the law voluntarily, giving the judging panel less time to come up with a verdict.

In addition to that, plea bargaining also helps to deal away with the trial’s uncertainty. This is from a perspective of criminal defense. It assures the defendant of not obtaining additional serious charges prior to the ones filed against them. In a case where the court is in dire need of proper evidence or the prosecution has turned out to be feeble, then the prosecution may easily find the accused guilty therefore making plea bargaining to be the only useful way (Heumman,