Ethical Considerations in the Criminal Justice Systems

While plea bargaining proposes plenty of advantages through the court of law in America and Canada, it shows some disadvantages as well. First off, plea bargaining seems unlawful to many. Every American is entitled to a right to a fair trial by the court of law. Giving the opportunity to plea bargain is taking away from those constitutional rights. Defendants

Plea bargaining has become an essential part of our criminal justice system. A vast majority of criminal cases in the United States are resolved by plea bargaining. Despite the rights that an accused has under the US Constitution, many will still accept a plea bargain. You are presumed innocent until guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the right to a trial by jury and to have an impartial judge. Even though you have these rights under the Constitution very few defendants are choosing to use them, instead relying on a plea bargain deal to be

Pleas don’t come without drawbacks or dangers. Some fear that an innocent defendant may be pressured into a confession and plea out of fear of a more severe penalty if convicted. Another drawback is that some vicious criminals will get lenient treatment and get less than they deserve and be back out in a shorter time. “More than 90% of convictions come from negotiated pleas, which means that less than 10% of criminal cases result in trial.” This statistic starts to answer a question I had about our system. “What are the effects of plea bargaining in our courts and should there be more control over them?” The obvious effects are that fewer cases actually go to trial. With less cases

There are two types of plea bargains : The first one is a charge bargain. When the prosecutor allows a defendant to "plead guilty to a lesser charge”, or to only some of the charges that have been filed against him. For example, a defendant charged with burglary may be offered the opportunity to plead guilty to "attempted burglary". A defendant charged with Drunk Driving and Driving with License Suspended may be offered the opportunity to plead guilty to just the drunk driving

A continuous response scale from 0-100 was used for certain variables while a response scale regarding 7 potential plea bargain offers was used in reference to other variables. While this study started out with 93 public defenders and 46 prosecutors, once missing data was calculated it ended up with 67 public defenders and 29 prosecutors (Pezdek, 2010-2011).

An agreement made in a criminal case between a prosecutor and its defendant, before reaching a trial is a plea bargain. The prosecutor offers an opportunity to the defendant to plead guilty. By agreeing to plead guilty to a crime the defendant would in exchange get a prosecutor’s promise to convince the judge to reduce the sentence. It is really impossible to predict what a jury is going to decide in a trial. I personally think that plea bargaining is being used as an easy way out; instead of having the person who committed the crime pay for what they did by serving the whole time. By managing a plea bargain the terms can sometimes be used to include pondering on how it works and who it can help.

I think that this is a debate in itself among the prosecutors and the defense because the prosecutors want to use it in hopes of getting more convictions instead of risking fighting a trial that is hard to get a guilty verdict from, while the defense try to resist plea bargaining as because they are willing to fight the trial due to the fact that there is bad evidence or no proof to get a guilty verdict. This is another reason why plea bargains are not going anywhere. The judges, however, are another story because they still to this day side with the prosecutors in wanting a lighter case load so that it gives more time for more important or time-consuming

Plea haggling developed as a noteworthy practice after the American Civil war and at first met with solid dissatisfaction. In any case by the by it turned into a routine strategy for determining criminal cases before the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth century. Economists ascribed its starting accomplishment to caseload, while social researchers accept that a movement in court flow and workgroup connections accomplished request deal the status of sentencing

So the trial is meant to achieve either determining guilt and issuing appropriate punishment for the crime and to prevent innocent people from being punished for a crime that they did not commit. Stephanos Bibas, a professor of Law and Criminology argues that “everyone trusted that trials remained as safety valves whenever guilt was in real doubt. The vast majority of defendants are factually and legally guilty, but surely, we assumed, those who are innocent would persist to vindicate their names at trial.” Unfortunately, because of pressures by the prosecution and fears of long, harsh sentences, “poorly informed, poorly educated, and poorly represented defendants are far from the fully informed, rational actors.” (Bibas, 2016). This means that some innocent people are taking a plea bargain for fear of greater punishment, even if they did not actually commit the crime. They have so little faith in the process of a trial working correctly that they feel it better to agree to a lesser punishment despite their innocence. Whether their lack of faith in the trial process is warranted or not, this signifies that there is something fundamentally wrong with the criminal justice

Today, the request deal is a fundamental piece of the criminal equity framework. The considerable dominant part of charges, more than 90 percent in numerous purviews, are settled through some sort of supplication deal, called a plea bargain. The Seventh Amendment of the Bill of Rights systematized it as a basic piece of Americans' freedoms. At the point when large amounts of criminals were gotten and charged, the legislature experienced a trial and decision. However, in the 1800s, a pattern toward supplication started. A request deal is an arranged understanding for a criminal respondent whereby he or she consents to confess in return for a greater result. This result might be the dropping of extra charges.

The idea of plea bargaining has been established for many years in not only the United States but in other countries as well. Though, many countries have adapted certain mechanism from what is an essential tool in the American justice system, plea bargaining is typically generalized to fit a countries individual needs. However, plea bargaining is ideally used before a case can go to trial to give a defendant an opportunity to serve a lesser charge or serve a lesser sentence instead of risking a chance of conviction and serving a long prison sentence. As we can see, each country has it on rules and regulations to follow when it comes to using plea bargaining to meet a common goal as displayed in their guidelines. All in all, the idea of plea

The most well-known case of such situation is so-called watershed precedent of Paul Lewis Hayes, which was indicted for attempting to pass forged check to the amount of $88. Such kind of crime is punishable by prison term of two to 10 years. So the prosecutor offered Hayes five years if he would plead guilty and waive this right to trial. Also the prosecutor made it clear that if Hayes rejects the offer, the state would seek a new indictment from a grand jury under Kentucky’s Habitual Criminal Act. Under this Hayes would receive life sentence taking into consideration his previous criminal record. Despite all these circumstances and high pressure, Hayes decided to insist on his right to jury trial. But in spite of his expectations, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Thus, plea bargaining has another advantage over jury trial – it allows criminal defendants not only to avoid full punishment, but also protects them from additional convictions. But as this case proves, it is possible to receive even higher punishment if one tries to defend his or her rights in trial.

Plea bargains are offered as an informal process to help speed up the case instead of going to trial, and they are accepted within the time offered. The key to the operation of the model regarding the one who is not screened out is called the belief of guilt. The primary objective of criminal justice process should be to discover the truth or to establish the factual guilt of the accused until proven guilty (Bohm & Haley 2011).

Hello, Ricardo, I agree with you that “Plea agreements play major positive and negative factors to both the defendant and the prosecutor”. I believe that if an individual is guilty of a specific crime, then he or she should be sentenced fairly and accordingly. Simply giving a defendant the choice of pleading guilty to lessen his or her sentence is not genuine justice. If a person is innocent, then he or she should not be influenced by legal officials to plead guilty to get a lighter sentence. On the other hand, if a person is given a plea agreement and is facing serious charges, then I don’t believe that this agreement will serve them or the prosecutors well. For one, if a person committed a horrendous crime, then they deserve to

Although Plea bargaining can save time and money, it may lead to a lack in public confidence in whether the courts are ‘just’ (Caenegem, 1999), it can be viewed as a limitation of the adversarial system because the prosecution compromise and allow defendants to shorten their own sentences rather than the jury deciding the degree of culpability (Marcus et al. (2016). The French inquisitorial system does not permit defendants to plead guilty. Even if a charge is not contested a court must produce ‘objective proof’ of guilt. (Goldstein & Marcus. (1977), defendants in the French system are regarded as subjects of investigation and as such it is the burden of the prosecutor to prove guilt (Pakes, 2015). The French system fits in with a quote produced by Marcus et al (2016) which