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Arraignment is a formal reading of a criminal charging document in the presence of the defendant, to inform them of the charges against them. In response to arraignment, in some jurisdictions, the accused is expected to enter a plea, in other jurisdictions no plea is required. Acceptable pleas vary among jurisdictions, but they generally include "guilty", "not guilty", and the peremptory pleas, or pleas in bar, setting out reasons why a trial cannot proceed. Pleas of nolo contendere and the Alford plea are allowed in some circumstances.
In United States law, an Alford plea, also called a Kennedy plea in West Virginia, an Alford guilty plea, and the Alford doctrine, is a guilty plea in criminal court, whereby a defendant in a criminal case does not admit to the criminal act and asserts innocence, but admits that the evidence presented by the prosecution would be likely to persuade a judge or jury to find the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. This can be caused by circumstantial evidence and testimony favoring the prosecution and difficulty finding evidence and witnesses that would aid the defense.
The adversarial system or adversary system is a legal system used in the common law countries where two advocates represent their parties' case or position before an impartial person or group of people, usually a judge or jury, who attempt to determine the truth and pass judgment accordingly. It is in contrast to the inquisitorial system used in some civil law systems where a judge investigates the case.
An indictment is a formal accusation that a person has committed a crime. In jurisdictions that use the concept of felonies, the most serious criminal offence is a felony; jurisdictions that do not use the felonies concept often use that of an indictable offence, an offence that requires an indictment.
Nolo contendere is a legal term that comes from the Latin phrase for "I do not wish to contend". It is also referred to as a plea of no contest or no defense.
A plea bargain is an agreement in criminal law proceedings, whereby the prosecutor provides a concession to the defendant in exchange for a plea of guilt or nolo contendere. This may mean that the defendant will plead guilty to a less serious charge, or to one of the several charges, in return for the dismissal of other charges; or it may mean that the defendant will plead guilty to the original criminal charge in return for a more lenient sentence.
In legal terms, a plea is simply an answer to a claim made by someone in a criminal case under common law using the adversarial system. Colloquially, a plea has come to mean the assertion by a defendant at arraignment, or otherwise in response to a criminal charge, whether that person pleaded or pled guilty, not guilty, nolo contendere, no case to answer, or Alford plea.
Criminal justice is the delivery of justice to those who have been accused of committing crimes. The criminal justice system is a series of government agencies and institutions. Goals include the rehabilitation of offenders, preventing other crimes, and moral support for victims. The primary institutions of the criminal justice system are the police, prosecution and defense lawyers, the courts and the prisons system.
An inquisitorial system is a legal system in which the court, or a part of the court, is actively involved in investigating the facts of the case. This is distinct from an adversarial system, in which the role of the court is primarily that of an impartial referee between the prosecution and the defense. Inquisitorial systems are used primarily in countries with civil legal systems, such as France and Italy, or legal systems based on Islamic law like Saudi Arabia, rather than in common law systems. It is the prevalent legal system in Continental Europe, Latin America, African countries not formerly under British rule, East Asia, Indochina, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Most countries with an inquisitorial system also have some form of civil code as their main source of law.
Entrapment is a practice in which a law enforcement agent or agent of the state induces a person to commit a "crime" that the person would have otherwise been unlikely or unwilling to commit. It "is the conception and planning of an offense by an officer or agent, and the procurement of its commission by one who would not have perpetrated it except for the trickery, persuasion or fraud of the officer or state agent".
A prosecutor is a legal representative of the prosecution in states with either the common law adversarial system or the civil law inquisitorial system. The prosecution is the legal party responsible for presenting the case in a criminal trial against an individual accused of breaking the law. Typically, the prosecutor represents the state or the government in the case brought against the accused person.
In law, a sentence is the punishment for a crime ordered by a trial court after conviction in a criminal procedure, normally at the conclusion of a trial. A sentence may consist of imprisonment, a fine, or other sanctions. Sentences for multiple crimes may be a concurrent sentence, where sentences of imprisonment are all served together at the same time, or a consecutive sentence, in which the period of imprisonment is the sum of all sentences served one after the other. Additional sentences include intermediate, which allows an inmate to be free for about 8 hours a day for work purposes; determinate, which is fixed on a number of days, months, or years; and indeterminate or bifurcated, which mandates the minimum period be served in an institutional setting such as a prison followed by street time period of parole, supervised release or probation until the total sentence is completed.
The United States Federal Sentencing Guidelines are rules published by the U.S. Sentencing Commission that set out a uniform policy for sentencing individuals and organizations convicted of felonies and serious misdemeanors in the United States federal courts system. The Guidelines do not apply to less serious misdemeanors or infractions.
The judicial system of Israel consists of secular courts and religious courts. The law courts constitute a separate and independent unit of Israel's Ministry of Justice. The system is headed by the President of the Supreme Court and the Minister of Justice.
Heath v. Alabama, 474 U.S. 82 (1985), is a case in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that, because of the doctrine of "dual sovereignty", the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution does not prohibit one state from prosecuting and punishing somebody for an act of which they had already been convicted of and sentenced for in another state.
Plea bargaining in the United States is very common; the vast majority of criminal cases in the United States are settled by plea bargain rather than by a jury trial. They have also been increasing in frequency—they rose from 84% of federal cases in 1984 to 94% by 2001. Plea bargains are subject to the approval of the court, and different States and jurisdictions have different rules. Game theory has been used to analyze the plea bargaining decision.
A citizen’s right to a trial by jury is a central feature of the United States Constitution. It is considered a fundamental principle of the American legal system.
In law and philosophy, voluntariness is a choice being made of a person's free will, as opposed to being made as the result of coercion or duress. Philosophies such as libertarianism and voluntaryism, as well as many legal systems, hold that a contract must be voluntarily agreed to by a party in order to be binding on that party. The social contract rests on the concept of the voluntary consent of the governed.
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 entitled to relief if the outcome of the plea process would have been different with competent advice. In such cases, the Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment requires the trial judge to exercise discretion to determine an appropriate remedy.
In the United States, the trial penalty refers to the difference between the smaller sentence offered to a defendant in a plea bargain prior to a criminal trial versus the larger sentence the defendant could receive if they elect to go to trial. It sits at the center of a legal debate over whether trial penalties abridge defendants' Sixth Amendment right to trial.
References
- ↑ Angela J. Davis (2007). Arbitrary justice: the power of the American prosecutor. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-517736-7.
- ↑ K Kipnis (1976), "Criminal Justice and the Negotiated Plea", Ethics, 86 (2): 93–106, doi:10.1086/291984, JSTOR 2379810, S2CID 159804955
- ↑ AW Alschuler (1968), Prosecutor's Role in Plea Bargaining, National Criminal Justice Reference Service
- ↑ SF Ross (1978), "Bordenkircher v. Hayes: Ignoring Prosecutorial Abuses in Plea Bargaining", California Law Review, 66 (4): 875–883, doi:10.2307/3479971, JSTOR 3479971
- ↑ M Tushnet, J Jaff (1985), Critical Legal Studies and Criminal Procedure, Catholic UL Rev.
- ↑ LC Griffin (2000), Prudent Prosecutor, The, Geo. J. Legal Ethics
- ↑ EJ Maiman (1980), Criminal Procedure-Due Process of Law-Prosecuting Attorneys-When a Prosecutor Adds a Distinct Charge Stemming from the Same Conduct Underlying the Original, U. Cin. L. Rev.
- ↑ GT Felkenes (1976), Plea bargaining: Its pervasiveness on the judicial system, Journal of Criminal Justice
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