Plea Bargains

Plea Bargaining serves for different purposes. It benefits the defense and the prosecutor. This gives the defendant the ability to walk away from higher charges with lower charges. This gives the prosecutors the ability to barging with the defense to arrive at what they want instead of bringing it to court. This is basically an offer formed by the prosecutor as an incentive to have the defendant plead guilty (Larson, 2000). There are three different types of plea bargaining, which come with positive and negatives to each, however plea bargains are given to many people to given chances he/she may not deserve.

There are three different types of plea bargains, charge bargaining, sentence bargaining, and count bargaining. Charge bargaining occurs when the prosecutor allows the defendant to plead guilty to a charge lesser than what was originally charged (Larson, 2000). For example a man is charged with a Driving while Under the Influence (DUI) first offense and possession of narcotics and paraphernalia, which was a felony, charge. This person was offered a plea bargain for pleading guilty to first offense DUI and was offered to drop the felony down to a misdemeanor for the possession of narcotics and paraphernalia. Sentence bargaining occurs when the defendant is told what he will be sentenced with if he pleads guilty. This is not common to happen but can be approved by a trial judge to help the defendant from being charged with more sever charges when brought to trial. Many times that sentence bargaining is used in high profile cases in which the defendant wants to be ensured that the sentencing is acceptable (Larson, 2000). For example a woman is charged for murdering her child; the prosecution tells her that if she does not fight the charges he/she will sentence her to only 10-15 years in prison instead of the maximum sentencing. With Count bargaining a person is being charged with more than one count of something and the defendant is attempting to reduce the number of counts (Larson, 2000). This type of plea bargaining is seen most often in cases involving multiple murder or rape cases. A person can try to bargain with the prosecution to lower the amount of counts that he/she would be charged for. These are all the different types of plea bargains that one would see take place in the process of pre-trials as well as during trials.

Plea bargains have some positives. If all the cases filed went to trial, the court systems would be overloaded with too much and fail at what they are there to set out to do. In some cases, plea bargains also allow prosecutors to get the plea they are looking for without go to trial (Larson, 2000). This helps alleviate the stress caused by a crowded calendar for both the judge and prosecution.

The negatives outweigh the positive concerning plea bargains. Many cases are just looked at and thought of in quick matters to get to the next person. Many people take plea bargains to avoid