Plea Bargaining

Plea Bargaining

Plea bargaining usually involves the defense and prosecution in a case working out a “mutually satisfactory disposition” in which the defendant pleads guilty to a lesser offense or fewer charges in exchange for a lighter penalty. Plea bargains are not always easy to recognize. Negotiations involving formal agreements are termed “explicit plea bargains”; however, some plea bargains are called “implicit plea bargains” because they involve no guarantee of leniency. Explicit bargains are the more important of the two.

The negotiation of a guilty plea is a very common practice in the criminal justice system. This is agreeing with the prosecutor that the client enters a plea of ??guilty to one or more counts in exchange for which the prosecutor may withdraw some charges for example, or commit to suggest a more lenient sentence to the judge. This is possible only if the customer agrees to have committed the acts for which he wants to plead guilty 9Combs & Nancy, 2006).

A normal crime is a crime in which the features of the criminal and the features of the crime align in such a way to fit preconceived notions about who commits what crimes and how. As opposed to stereotypes of crimes and criminals, the system of normal crimes is organized around the penal codes and formal classifications of crimes, as well as around the routine experiences of those who use the codes to organize their everyday work—namely those involved in the criminal justice system. This system of conceptions of crimes and schemas of criminal behavior then organize the behavior of those in the judicial system. The concept of the normal crime, as first described by David Sudnow in his classic 1965 article in Social Problems, “Normal Crimes: Sociological Features of the Penal Code in a Public Defender Office,” has been adopted into a wide variety of criminological and sociological understandings of routine court activity and other arenas where a “typical” expectation is taken among many, sometimes competing, actors (Bibas, 2004).

In this study of meaning and practice in a public defender's office, Sudnow demonstrates how crimes and criminals become “normal” and how the designation of normal affects the way in which the various constituents of the court community act toward a given case. In this analysis, he engages in dialogue with two groups of criminologists and sociologists who critique the ways in which penal codes are analyzed in research. The first group, which he terms the revisionist perspective, seeks to create categories of crimes that are enriched by information about motive and background on the criminal. The second group, with which he initially aligns himself, seeks to understand penal codes as the way in which the workers of the criminal justice environment orient themselves toward their work. Critiquing this second perspective as “more promissory than productive,” Sudnow wants to expand on John Kitsuse and Aaron Cicourel's position regarding how to use official statistics and understand how legal officials use criminal codes in their daily work (Alschuler & Albert, ...