Alford plea

In the PBS Frontline documentary, “The Plea,” written, produced, and directed by Ofra Bikel, released on June 17, 2004, legal cases are intertwined around the central issue of the justice system failing American people through the use of plea bargains. The main problem is that innocent people are pleading guilty, and they do not necessarily know what making that plea means for them in the future. Another issue is that certain lawyers and judges in the criminal justice system rush to convict…

Describe the advantages and disadvantages of plea bargains. Make sure to list at least 2 reasons for each. Finally, do you support plea bargains? Why or why not? The advantages of plea bargains is having the ability to have a lighter sentence for the defendant only if they plead guilty. Another advantages is having the defendant have the charges reduced, by pleading guilty to a misdemeanor instead of a felony. As there is advantages, it has many disadvantages to this bargain, it removes the…

The idea of a plea bargain presents people who have been charged with a sentence the opportunity to reduce their time served by admitting guilt to their charges. This system gives people who are already beyond reasonable doubt proven to be guilty a free way to reduce their sentence only to lighten the load of the court system. Instead of trying to improve the efficiency of our court system and to provide alternate services such as rehabilitation the government has found a way to incarcerate a…

authors Take a look into our plea-bargaining systems role into wrongful convictions. According to our authors plea- bargaining dispose of roughly 95 % of adjudicated criminal cases (Maguire, Tbls. 5.24.2008, 5.46.2006). Over my years of taking criminal justice course I have learned to so many innocent people actually plead guilty to crimes they did not commit. DNA evidence which lead to an exoneration is evidence of just that. Wrongful convictions produce out of our Plea Bargaining are much less…

did confess to the murder, but all of his points of the story seemed contradictory “Plea Bargaining”. This is the first sign of the wrong conviction because three men should not have been accused and convicted of this murder. Another reason that it was hard to believe these men did it was because at the time of the crime Dixon was known to have seizures often, and Bivens was living in California at the time “Plea Bargaining.” The fact that Bobby Ray had seizures so bad and so often, it would be…

sure if he was going to have a council. With every person that went, the judge read them their rights and asked them questions. For each person, it was the same. Some of the many questions included, “Do you know your Miranda rights,” “What is your plea,” and “Is this your signature written here on this paper.” Also after every person that went, after Judge Martian used a wooden gavel, he says “Enjoy yourself and take care.” After the arrangement was over I decided to come back for a…

moves like a snail and is always unpredictable. Imagine if a significant amount of cases was going to trial instead of over 90% of felony cases are plea bargained (Bohm, R., Haley, K.,n.d). Nevertheless, there are three types of plea bargains and prosecutors tend to have factors to decide if the plea bargain is in the best interest or what’s the better plea bargain to make depending on the situation. The first example, a defendant might plead guilty to trespass and a misdemeanor vandalism…

The three basic types of plea bargaining are allowing the defendant to plead guilty to a lesser offense, a defendant who pleads guilty receives less time at the request of the prosecutor, and a defendant who agrees to plead guilty to one charge in order to avoid other charges that could be brought (Bohm & Haley, 2011). The factors that prosecutors take into consideration when determining to plea bargain are the seriousness of the crime, the defendants criminal record, and how strong of a case…

PLEA BARGAINING The defendant’s lawyer attempted plea bargaining with the prosecution due to the excessive evidence against his case and implored Wilson to plead guilty to robbery, breaking and entering, and trespassing in exchange for the prosecution not charging him with murder…

arraignment phase since the defendant accepts a plea deal. The Vigo County courthouse is classified into six divisions based on the types of cases each judge presides over. I decided to view the cases of division five which deals with impaired driving and drug cases. The cases that I watched were known as assembly line justice, meaning that an actual trial does not take place since the defendant pleads guilty in order to get a plea deal. Since they take a plea agreement this stage is known as…