Plea Bargaining in the United States Criminal Justice System - Essay Example

lude reading the charges and allowing the accused to make a plea, which might be stating whether they are guilty, or acceptance through lack of contestation usually referred to as nolo contendere. The nature of plea entered by the defendant implicates the judicial process in several ways, particularly if the course of the proceedings depends on the powers of the prosecutor (Schmalleger, 2011). Plea bargaining involves the agreement between the involved parties, mainly the prosecutor and the defense team to reach a consensus on the plea entered with the authority of the court.

It may appear counterproductive for instance to enter a not-guilty plea while the facts before the court indicate that the case will be lost by the defendant. Alternatively, plea bargaining may occur on request of the prosecution if the evidence in the possession of the prosecution does not amount to a case strong enough to defeat the prosecution. In summary, plea bargains control the judicial process to avoid spending of resources and time by engaging in a process that arrive at conclusions that could guide the process if otherwise received in the beginning of the trial.

Plea bargaining takes three potential areas of interest for the parties to engage in negotiations, with charge bargaining, sentence bargaining and fact bargaining forming different perspectives for trade-in. This discussion highlights the first two areas of bargaining (charge and sentence) for purposes of differentiating how the negotiations proceed (Schmalleger, Siegel and Worrall, 2011). In terms of charge bargaining, the prosecutor and defense team revisit the particular counts of criminal offences pursued by the prosecution so as to arrive at an agreement founded on the case probabilities.

The prosecutor convinces the defendant to enter the guilty plea on lesser charges while other charges are dropped in order to save the process from long undue procedures. As an illustration, the defendant may accept an offer to