Sentencing Rationales and Plea Bargaining - Essay Example

Retribution and plea-bargaining The purpose of the legal justice criminal system is to punish offenders for crimes committed against the public. Plea bargaining involves pre-trial negotiations between the prosecution and the accused whereby the accused agrees to plead guilty for a minor charge or for only few charges. The purpose is to allow a lenient judgment against the accused and reduce wastage of time during full trial. Plea bargaining discourages sentencing roles since retribution is aimed at punishing the offender in equal measure to the crime committed.

Retribution seeks to deter crime hence plea bargaining prevents the achievement of the retribution objective. Retribution and plea bargainingIntroduction One of the reasons why courts exist is to provide justice by ensuring that the punishment an offender is given is proportionate to the crime committed. After claims that unwarranted sentencing occurred in US, the congress decided to ensure justice by coming up with guidelines which were to be used by all courts when it came to criminal sentencing.

The Sentencing Act was formulated and passed with the main aim of ensuring that unwarranted disparities which were thought to exist in the judicial systems were eliminated (Stith & Koh, 1993). Retribution which means offering sentencing criminals to serve punishments that are to some extent proportional to the crimes committed plays a major role in sentencing. This is because, the essence of judicial systems is to provide justice and justice means paying a price that is equivalent to the crime committed.

The formulation of the criminal sentencing guidelines that have a table with ranges that people who have committed certain crimes should be sentenced clearly shows that retribution forms an extremely strong basis in sentencing. Based on the sentencing guidelines, the crime for which a person is convicted will always form the basic offense level with details of the case further determining the sentence by either subtracting or adding. The alteration in the sentence presented by the base offence depends on the role played by the person and the amount of damage that the person might have caused.

For example a robbery will form the base offence with minor details such as whether the person used a gun or shot somebody adding to the sentence while a person who was involved in robbery with violence but played a minor role might end up getting lesser sentence than a person who will be judged to have played a vital role getting a tougher sentence (Stith & Koh, 1993). Plea bargaining is where the prosecutor and the defense counsel come to an agreement concerning the committed crime. The defense counsel agrees his or her client with plead guilty and the prosecutor will recommend to the judge to reduce the term the person is to be sentenced.

This discourages the goals of each sentencing rationale because it would be acting against the principle of retribution where a person should be sentenced to a term equivalent to the crime committed. Even though plea bargaining might be advantageous in the judicial system especially where the person admits the crime committed and feels sorry but has to serve the term for the committed crime (Schulhofer, 1992). Conclusion Pursuing plea bargaining would be seeing like joking or bribing the judicial system where it cannot be used deliver justice by punishing criminal on the basis of crimes committed.

Plea bargaining also reduces the ability of a judge determining the sentence that a person deserves on the basis of crime committed and follows the sentence range drafted by the prosecutor and the defense counsel. It is therefore evident that plea-bargaining significantly discourages the goals of each sentencing rationale and should not be applied in the court system if justice is to be served (Schulhofer, 1992). ReferencesSchulhofer, S. J. (1992), "Plea Bargaining as Disaster", The Yale Law Journal (The Yale Law Journal) 101 (8): 1979–2000.Stith, K. & Koh, S. Y. (1993), “The Politics of Sentencing Reform: The Legislative History of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines”, 28 Wake Forest L. Rev. 223