Role Of Plea Bargaining In Criminal Justice

Plea bargaining has become a common procedure in the criminal justice over the years, as it serve as a method of forming an agreement between the prosecutor and defendant in which the accused pleads guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence or reduced charge. Plea bargaining has become a prevalent method for several reasons. It benefits defendants in that it allows to avoid the time and expense of defending themselves during trial as well as the chance of harsher punishment. Plea bargaining also serves as a benefit for the prosecution as it saves both time and costs of a trial. As such, the court is saved by the burden of proceeding to trial on every criminal charge, resulting in reduced clogging of cases. Our criminal justice system is founded
Most Anglo-American courts actively discouraged guilty pleas and the procedure of “Plea bargaining emerged as a significant practice only after the American Civil War, and it generally met with strong disapproval on the part of the appellate courts” (Alschuler 211). Plea bargaining began to appear in court reports after the Civil War, which included the first such case, Swang v. State, in which the defendant pleaded guilty to two counts of gambling as was dismissed from eight other gambling charges (224 Alschuler). Such surveys conducted in the 1920’s revealed that an increased number of plea bargaining agreements may have caused some defendants to plead guilty, even though they could not have been convicted at trial. As the number of convictions by guilty plea increased during the time following the 1920’s, “both the percentage of convictions at trial and percentage of acquittals showed a sharp decline” (Alschuler 230). Records today indicate that approximately 90% to 95% of criminal convictions are reached through plea bargaining. While the prominent goal of our justice system is to provide justice for all, justice is difficult to accomplish, for there are many various factors that contribute to crime, such as educational, social, and psychopathological factors, which must be considered to provide justice
Kathryn’s duty to do justice as the prosecutor, also applies during plea bargaining, whereby, a persons guilt must be established based on proof beyond a reasonable doubt. As such, the prosecutor’s primary objective “is to avoid punishing an innocent person. Because a prosecutor is obligated to act in all stages in the criminal justice process consistently with the sovereign's view that it is more important to avoid punishing the innocent, this principle applies to a prosecutor's efforts in resolving cases pre-trial” (Stern 1034). Regardless of how confident the prosecutor is of the defendant’s guilt, the prosecutor must ensure he does not offer a plea bargain that would result in an innocent individual to plead guilty as such an offer would subordinate the purpose of preventing an innocent individual from being punished to that of punishing a guilty individual, “thereby failing to strike the balance that justice requires” (Stern 1035). O’Hear suggests that a defendant should have the opportunity to convey their side of the story in order for the defendant to avoid getting convicted if they are innocent. It would also be beneficial to enhance the defendants perceptions of procedural justice by developing an objective criteria in order to direct plea negotiations and explain the prosecutors