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A plea bargain, also known as a plea agreement or plea deal, is a legal arrangement in criminal law where the defendant agrees to plead guilty or no contest to a charge in exchange for concessions from the prosecutor. These concessions can include a reduction in the severity of the charges, the dismissal of some charges, or a more lenient ...
Plea bargaining has existed for centuries; in older legal systems convictions were at times routinely procured by confession, and laws existed covering such criminal confessions, although by the 18th century inducements had been forbidden in English Law to prevent miscarriage of justice. [10]
In law, a plea is a defendant's response to a criminal charge. [1] A defendant may plead guilty or not guilty. Depending on jurisdiction, additional pleas may be available, including nolo contendere (no contest), no case to answer (in the United Kingdom), or an Alford plea (in the United States).
In short, plea bargains outside the law's shadow depend on prosecutors' ability to make credible threats of severe post-trial sentences. Sentencing guidelines make it easy to issue those threats." [24] The federal guilty plea rate has risen from 83% in 1983 to 96% in 2009, [25] a rise attributed largely to the Sentencing Guidelines.
The plea deal included Hunter Biden pleading guilty to two tax misdemeanors and entering a diversion program for a felony charge of possessing a firearm during his crack cocaine addiction, a copy ...
The memo establishes that a prosecutor’s discretion to resolve a case with a softer plea is limited to "unusual facts." It specifically mentions the appropriateness of pursuing the death penalty ...
[3] [4] Plea bargaining is pervasive in the United States, with most criminal defendants accepting a plea deal rather than going to trial. [5] At the federal level, just 2% of defendants elect to go to trial. [6] The constitutionality of plea bargaining has been repeatedly affirmed by the United States Supreme Court (e.g. Brady v.
Lafler v. Cooper, 566 U.S. 156 (2012), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court clarified the Sixth Amendment standard for reversing convictions due to ineffective assistance of counsel during plea bargaining. The Court ruled that when a lawyer's ineffective assistance leads to the rejection of a plea agreement, a defendant is ...