Both sides will carefully weigh the strength of their case and decide whether it is prudent to go to trial. The prosecution may also consider the publicity surrounding the case and whether there is public pressure to prosecute that particular defendant to the full extent of the law. The defense will consider the individual defendant’s desire to go to trial and the seriousness of the potential sentence. The Pros of Plea Bargaining
David Feige’s Indefensible: One Lawyer’s Journey nto the Inferno of American Justice invites people from all walks of life to a second hand experience of the criminal justice system hard at work. What is most interesting about Feige’s work is its distinct presentation of the life of a public defender in the South Bronx. Instead of simply detailing out his experiences as a public defender, Feige takes it a step further and includes the experiences of his clients. Without the personal relationships that he carefully constructs with each of his defendants, Feige would not be able to argue that the criminal justice system is flimsy at best, decisions always riding on either the judge’s personal attitudes or the clients propensity towards plea bargaining.
Fracture is a movie that focuses on the court proceedings of an attempted murder trial and emphasizes the legal aspects of this event. In the film, there are several instances in which the Constitutional Amendments are used in the movie as positive or negative rulings in the court. Because this is a movie follows a complex court case, it is an excellent source for these Constitutional Amendments and provides a multitude of examples to accurately represent the commonly used amendments in trials and arrests. This movie focuses primarily on the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, as well as the basic concepts of criminal justice.
Our Constitution has long required the criminally accused to be tried by their peers. The question before us today is whether Florida’s death sentencing scheme violates the Sixth Amendment in light of the decision in Ring v. Arizona., 536 U.S. 584 (2002). We hold that it does violate the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial. I
Review: Plea bargaining is the practice where a prosecutor and a criminal defendant agree on a disposition of a criminal case, subject to court approval. It can determine a case without a trial and it commonly used. The Attorney General of Alaska, Arum Gross, wanted to change this frequently used process of plea bargaining. On July 3, 1975, he issued written instructions forbidding all district attorneys and their assistants from engaging in plea bargaining.
The history of the modern right to counsel for defendants who cannot afford to pay for counsel or lawyer goes back over a century ago; the Indiana Supreme Court in Webb v. Baird, 6 Ind. 13 (1853), officially recognized the right to counsel for a person accused of a crime. However, this decision was not based on constitutional or statutory law but warranted under “the principles of a civilized society.” Since the case of Webb v. Baird, the courts have immensely extended the right to counsel beyond just appointing an indigent person an attorney. For more than a hundred years, the Right to Counsel Clause was interpreted as simply granting the right to retain a private attorney to a defendant but didn’t mean that a poor criminal defendant had
Twelve Angry Men is in many ways a love letter to the American legal justice system. We find here eleven men, swayed to conclusions by prejudices, past experience, and short-sightedness, challenged by one man who holds himself and his peers to a higher standard of justice, demanding that this marginalized member of society be given his due process. We see the jurors struggle between the two, seemingly conflicting, purposes of a jury, to punish the guilty and to protect the innocent. It proves, however, that the logic of the American trial-by-jury system does work.
Our arguments against plea bargaining were based on the fact that it removes a fundamental Constitutional right from defendants, the right to a fair trial. There are many different reasons to be against plea bargains, and they all stem from this singular idea of denial of fundamental rights. It is clear that “…plea bargaining has undercut the goals of legal doctrines as diverse as the fourth amendment exclusionary rule, the insanity defense, the right of confrontation, the defendant’s right to attend criminal proceedings, and the recently announced right of the press and the public to observe the administration of criminal justice,” (Alschuler, 1983). The process of plea bargaining strips defendants of these rights and defenses and opens the
The film Dear Zachary, directed by Kurt Kuenne, makes an argument in response to a very specific situation: the murder of Kuenne’s best friend Andrew Bagby and Bagby’s son Zachary, both killed by Andrew’s ex-girlfriend Shirley Turner. Kuenne argues that bail should be denied to anybody accused of a serious crime who also has custody of a child. While this argument is reasonable, it only provides a solution for very narrow circumstances. For the greater protection of society as a whole, an expanded version of Kuenne’s stance on bail laws is necessary. Bail should be denied not only to people accused of a serious crime who have custody of a child, but also to anybody suspect of a violent crime.
This shows that By abolishing plea bargaining we subject ourselves to serious congestion within the court's and violate defendants rights. “The system would collapse if every case that was filed in the criminal justice system were to be set for trial," says Judge Caprice Cosper . The court system heavily relies on the use of pleas to keep the system moving; they enable courts to handle a lot more “traffic”—to resolve more criminal cases than they could through
The Sixth Amendment talks about how everyone has the right to a speedy trial and the right to a public trial. This means that if the person asks for a speedy trial they have to honor it. This prevents them to hold the prisoner for an unreasonably long amount of time without a trial. Another thing is you are entitled to face the witnesses accusing you of your wrongdoing. You can’t have a trial without the witness so you have to have to face the witness at the trial.
Because of the practical benefits of plea bargaining, it is doubtful it will be eliminated anytime soon. It helps the Court and State to manage the caseloads (Worrall & Moore, 2014). It reduces the work load of the prosecutors enabling them to prepare for gravest case by leaving the effortless and petty offences to settle through plea bargaining. It is also a factor in reforming the offender by accepting the responsibility for their actions and by submitting them voluntarily before law, without having an expensive and time consuming trial (Worrall & Moore,
In the Yale Law Journal: Plea Bargain as Disaster , author Schulhofer explains the disadvantages of the plea-bargaining process. The article is focused around the concept of separating the innocent from the guilty. Schulhofer recognizes that abolishing this process would only cause more problems for the system, so instead he analyzes how reforming the process would be more beneficial to both the system and the public. It is important to consider reforming the process in terms of system because there would be a clearer idea of what crimes are permitted to have pleas and which are
Since the courts are backlogged and many public defenders and judges being overworked, this causes plea bargaining to be used repeatedly. According to Walker et al. (2018), plea bargaining leaves many people no option but to plea guilty even when this is not their best option. This is due to a multitude of reasons but mainly to receive a lesser charge. For example, a felony and little time in jail may be better than risking multiple felonies and an excessive amount of time in jail.
The United States have been implementing plea bargaining in the country for several hundred years because the “full blown” trial with all the guarantees is not affordable today. In a criminal case, the accused has three options as far as pleas are concerned guilty, not guilty or a plea of nolo contendere. A plea-bargain is a contractual agreement between the prosecution and the accused concerning the disposition of a criminal charge. However, unlike most contractual agreements, it is not enforceable until a judge approves it. Plea bargaining thus refers to pre-trial negotiations between the defence and the prosecution, in which the accused agrees to plead guilty in exchange for certain concessions guaranteed by the prosecutor.
