… Known as “arraignment.”
I have very little experience with criminal procedure — Bricker is your man for that.
But it seems that in the U.S. federal courts, arraignment is divided into two parts. According to Wikipedia — Arraignment - Wikipedia —
This is very interesting, thank you all for teaching me about this stuff. I think the “Yeah? Prove I did it!” idea is sound.
But, I’m unsure about something. The cops, prosecutors, lawyers, judge, and jury would be massively inconvenienced should he decide to plead not guilty. Hours, days, weeks, off their lives, dealing with this punk.
So if we ignore for a moment the fact that he’s got a one in a million chance of getting off scot free, and that even that’s a good enough reason to say “not guilty,” say we assume he doesn’t care about his own life and he wants to make it as hard on the prosecution as possible.
Can’t the perpetrator say “I’ll only plead guilty and spare you this massive pain in the ass if you give me x y or z. Otherwise, fuck you all, I want to make this as much of a circus as possible.” The legal system would obviously say, fuck you too, and try the guy, but do they REALLY want more legal hassle? More money to be spent on lawyers and evidence teams and shit? They have a guy willing to plead guilty. Why aren’t they more receptive to at least giving him x y or z, depending on the reasonableness of x y or z. Is it folly to leverage your guilty plea in this way? The only power you as a criminal have that the legal system can’t take from you is the power to make everyone’s life a pain in the ass. And that’s a lot of lives you’re affecting. Assuming you don’t care about your own, can you use that as a bargaining chip?
Maybe I am massively overestimating how much the legal system would want any part of negotiations, and overestimating how much they care about one more trial. But a mass shooter with a lot of victims would have a long, drawn out trial that would call in hundreds of experts, media, psychologists, and the like. Tons of money spent on hiring people to prove the obvious.
Just a thought.
Thanks,
Dave
I think you’re overestimating how often criminal cases make it to trial at all. Something like 90 percent of charges end in a guilty plea before trial after exactly the kind of bargaining you allude to.
So?
The whole system is set up so that trials can happen when their needed. It’s part of the job for the cops, prosecutors, judges, etc. There are many trials (not that many percentage-wise, but you get the idea) that take place because the prosecutor basically says “no deals.” Plead guilty as charged or go to trial. There is still the incentive expressed or implied, that the judge might give you a slightly better sentence if you don’t make the victim come in and testify or waste everyone’s time. Most cases get resolved by a plea, so there is no major problem letting the other cases go to trial.
So since actually going through the trial would be a huge pain in the ass, it turns out that Lee does have a bargaining chip even though his case is a slam dunk for the prosecution. His lawyer can negotiate a guilty plea in return for a slightly reduced sentence. If the prosecution doesn’t have anything to offer him in return for a guilty plea then they’re just going to have to go through the hassle of holding the trial.
As to why a junkie who killed a guy in a botched robbery doesn’t have the remorse to stand up in court and admit everything and take whatever sentence the prosecution asks for, well, if he were that kind of person maybe he wouldn’t have shot a guy in a botched robbery in the first place?
Expecting junkies and muggers to do the right thing in court is a little far fetched. If they were the kind of person who would cooperate freely with the authorities, then they wouldn’t be out sticking guns in people’s faces and demanding money.
Even if his guilt is as obvious as that, the prosecutors have an incentive of avoiding the expense of a trial. Therefore I would expect that they would offer something in return for a guilty plea. Maybe ask for ten years instead of twenty, or twenty instead of life.
Lee could still roll the dice at trial, but he would have to balance that off against the increased sentence if convicted.
A lawyer once told me “If you did it and it is your first offense, accept the deal they will offer you and plead guilty”. Obviously that would change if I were accused of murder or something like that. But usually for less serious crimes than that, the DAs will offer something to get it off their plate ASAP. But if they’ve got you dead to rights, you do the best you can. A defense lawyer might be useful in getting a better deal, but maybe not.
For a charge of murder -
The guy is brought before the emperor to be sentenced to death. He says, “Your Majesty, if you let me live for a year, I will teach your horse to talk.” The emperor agrees.
As they are walking out, someone asks the prisoner to explain. He replies -
"A year is a long time. Maybe the emperor will die. Maybe the horse will die. Maybe I will die.
Or maybe the horse will talk."
Regards,
Shodan
This is what plea bargaining IS. Typically you plead guilty in exchanged for some amount of sentence reduction, or the reduction of the charge to one that is less serious. Have you never heard the term?
There is (as Shodan mentions) always an incentive. Trials are expensive and resources (both in terms of manpower and funding) are finite. That is especially true right now, with states’ budget cuts stretching public defenders’ and prosecutors’ offices to the limit.
I question the notion that pleading guilty to a criminal charge is “doing the right thing.” It is not your legal or moral duty to make the state’s case easy.
It all depends what the defendant is charged with, and what he is asking for. If there’s surveillance camera footage of him shooting a dozen kids to death at a school and he is asking for a two-year sentence in a minimum-security prison, then there’s going to be a trial, and the sentence will be whatever the jury decides. OTOH, if he just wants the death penalty taken off of the table, then the prosecutor might be willing to give him that if he’ll plead guilty and spare the massive expense and hassle of a trial.
The more heinous the crime and/or the more likely a guilty verdict is (based on evidence, eyewitnesses, etc.), the less will be offered to the defendant in return for a guilty plea.
This is why I am a pianist and not a lawyer. All I know about the law I know from Mariska Hargitay. Thanks, boyo.
So if the state isn’t interested in offering anything, they just have to suck it up and go through due process. Who benefits financially from a drawn out trial, besides lawyers? Does the “media” make any money through a show trial (e.g. OJ) Is a judge paid a certain amount per trial, or is it part of the job description?
Judges are salaried.
Since some good factual answers have already been provided by other posters, I’d like to just address pianodave’s question on a more philosophical level. A finding of guilt is a legal determination that can only be made by a court. Assume I pull out a gun and shoot John Smith, killing him instantaneously. While I have very much killed him, the question of whether I am guilty of the crime of murder remains unanswered until a court or jury makes that determination. So I would challenge the OP’s presumption that anyone can ever be “clearly guilty.”
It’s not that the state isn’t interested in offering anything at all, it’s just that the state isn’t interested in offering enough: the defendant’s demands are seen as excessive/unreasonable relative to the severity of the crime and/or the strength of the evidence against him.
The state has an interest in justice, even if it costs some money. They’re not going to make plea deals that let serial murderers walk free with only 1 year in jail just because a trial would cost (SWAG) $100,000.
A similar process exists with regard to civil suits. A plaintiff may approach someone and threaten to file a (for example) $10M lawsuit against them, but will offer (or accept an offer) to settle out of court for $5M. The amount of the settlement (and whether it gets accepted) depends on what each party believes is likely to happen at trial. If the defendant believes a $10M judgment against him is very likely, he may offer something close to it to settle out of court (since an out-of-court settlement saves him time and legal costs). If plaintiff believes he has slim odds of getting a verdict in his favor, he may be willing to accept an out-of-court settlement for much less than $10M.
Legal, no. Moral, sure. When you were a kid and you broke the rules, was it your duty to tell your mother (or whatever authority figure best fits your case)? Or was it her job to establish your guilt?
Your family is not analogous to the state. They can’t impose criminal penalties. There is no adversarial system.
Yup. “Prove it, ma. Anybody coulda walked in off the street and done it. You got any real evidence?”
irrelevant in the same way the First Amendment is irrelevant regarding posts on the SDMB.