In legal terms, a plea is simply an answer to a claim made by someone in a civil or criminal case under common law using the adversary system. Colloquially, a plea has come to mean the assertion by a criminal defendant at arraignment, or otherwise in response to a criminal charge, whether that person pleaded Guilty, Not Guilty, No Contest or Alford plea.
The concept of the plea is one of the major differences between criminal procedure under common law and procedure under the civil law system. Under common law, a plea of guilty by the defendant waives trial of the charged offences and the defendant may be sentenced immediately. This produces a system under American law known as plea bargaining.
In civil law jurisdictions, there is generally no concept of a plea of guilty. A confession by the defendant is treated like any other piece of evidence, and a full confession does not prevent a full trial from occurring or relieve the plaintiff(s) from its duty of presenting a case to the trial court.
A "blind plea" is a guilty plea entered with no plea agreement in place. One defendant accused of illegally protesting nuclear power, when asked to enter his plea, stated, "I plead for the beauty that surrounds us"; this type of unorthodox plea is sometimes referred to as a "creative plea," and will usually be interpreted as a plea of not guilty. Likewise, standing mute and refusing to enter any plea at all will usually be interpreted as a not guilty plea; the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, for instance, state, "If a defendant refuses to enter a plea or if a defendant organization fails to appear, the court must enter a plea of not guilty."
These are pleas which claim that a case cannot proceed for some reason. They are so called because, rather than being an answer to the question of guilt or innocence, they are a claim that the matter of guilt or innocence should not be considered.
They are :
Virtually all jurisdictions hold that defense counsel need not discuss with defendants the collateral consequences of pleading guilty, such as consecutive sentencing or even treatment as an aggravating circumstance in an ongoing capital prosecution. However, the Supreme Court recognized an important exception in Padilla v. Kentucky (2010), in which the Court held that defense counsel is obligated to inform defendants of the potential immigration consequences of a guilty plea. Thus a defendant who is not advised of immigration consequences may have an ineffective assistance of counsel argument.
In the U.S. federal system, the court must also satisfy itself that there is a factual basis for the guilty plea. However, this safeguard may not be very effective, because the parties, having reached a plea agreement, may be reluctant to reveal any information that could disturb the agreement. When a plea agreement has been made, the judge's factual basis inquiry is usually perfunctory, and the standard for finding that the plea is factually based is very low.
In United States v. Binion, malingering or feigning illness during a competency evaluation was held to be obstruction of justice and led to an enhanced sentence. Although the defendant had pled guilty, he was not awarded a reduction in sentence because the feigned illness was considered to mean that he was not accepting responsibility for his illegal behavior.
Until 1772, if a defendant refused to plead guilty or not guilty, his trial was delayed from taking place, and he was tortured until he either died or entered a plea. This was changed to allow the judge to enter a plea of not guilty if the defendant refused to plead.
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
