PLEA BARGAINS

Plea-bargaining can mean many things to many people, in and out of the courtroom. Let

us first start by defining plea bargain. Plea bargain is defined an agreement in which the

defendant enters a guilty plea in exchange for a reduced sentence. This is the technical meaning,

but as I stated before, the word plea bargain can mean very different things to very different

people.

To the accused, the word plea bargain means a freedom of choice. To the prosecutor, it

means a lesser workload. To the Judge, it means saving his time and the courts time, and to the

state, a plea bargain means saving money. In my perception, the word plea bargain means a

failure of the American trial system. The Constitution grants us, the citizens of this country, a

right to speedy trial by jury of our peers. Where exactly do you see that right, which is rightfully

ours, in plea bargains? How can our trial and court system not bestow the punishment that fits

the crime? When we give the accused freedom of choice, isn’t that an oxymoron? The only

effectiveness I can see in the court system plea bargains is that solely the courts are benefitting

from them. The courts save time, money and the prosecutors save themselves from a huge

workload. Plea bargains have no effectiveness on the justice. How are the victims given justice if

the accused gets a far lesser sentence and punishment than is fairly just? How can the accused

learn their lesson when they have the freedom to choose a lesser punishment? How does the

public perceive our trial system as fair and just when plea bargains are being over used to save

time and money?

Mehrin Reid Expository Writing Composition

Plea bargaining is not a useful tool. The court systems, in order to save themselves from a

trial, “…forces the party into a situation where they have to take a guess about what the evidence

is, about how strong the case might be, and they have to make that guess against the background

of enormously severe penalties if you guess wrong.” (Schulhofer, 2004)

Even though defendants are innocent, they do not know if they will be proved innocent or

guilty without a reasonable doubt when in front of a jury. They are pressured into taking a guilty

plea because they cannot afford the risk of going to trial. The court systems are unable to sort

out the guilty people from the innocent and that is the main reason this system of plea bargaining

is not a useful tool to the courts, the public, the defendants and the victims.

The word plea bargain may mean many different things to many different people but

what we must understand is that plea bargain has many more cons than pros for both the faith of

the people in the criminal justice system as well as the victims. Our justice system should be fair

and just for all but all it seems to do is save time and money for the state and put many innocent

people in jail and give the freedom of choice. It is time to change our trial and court systems to

reflect what our founding fathers initially desired from it, the right to a speedy trial from our jury

of peers, because the only people plea bargains benefit are the GUILTY!

Mehrin Reid Expository Writing Composition

Works CitedSchulhofer, S. (2004, June 17). Frontline. Retrieved October 22, 2010 from PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plea/faqs/

Seiter, R. P. (2008). The Role of Plea Bargaining and Sentencing. In R. P. Seiter, Corrections An Introduction 2nd Edition (pp. 47-48). Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Mehrin Reid Expository Writing Composition