Fact bargaining

Fact bargaining is a type of

guilty plea

. Fact bargaining can also involve the defendant stipulating to certain facts in exchange for certain concessions so the prosecutor does not need to prove those facts.

Nancy King has argued that fact bargaining defeats the intention of the sentencing guidelines to have judges find facts.^[1] According to William G. Young, fact bargaining "involves a fraud on the court as the government's recital of material facts during the plea colloquy and at sentencing necessarily must omit or at minimum gloss over facts material to sentencing. . . . . If fact bargaining is acceptable, then the entire moral and intellectual basis for the Sentencing Guidelines is rendered essentially meaningless."^[2] Judges rarely overturn stipulations reached by fact bargaining.^[3]

In some cases, "creative" plea bargains are reached in which the defendant pleads guilty to a totally different lesser crime. An example would be a robbery suspect pleading guilty to

copyright violation.^[4]

References

^ "Time for crime: Who decides?". Archived from the original on 2011-03-05. Retrieved 2010-07-12.
^ "Berthoff v. United States, 140 F. Supp. 2d 50 (D. Mass. 2001)".
^ United States v. Pimentel, 932 F2d 1029, 1033 (2d Cir. 1991).
^ Clouse, Thomas (May 1, 2006). "Man pleads guilty to bogus crime". The Spokesman-Review. p. A1. Retrieved September 23, 2014.

[1] "Time for crime: Who decides?". Archived from the original on 2011-03-05. Retrieved 2010-07-12.

[2] "Berthoff v. United States, 140 F. Supp. 2d 50 (D. Mass. 2001)".

[3] United States v. Pimentel, 932 F2d 1029, 1033 (2d Cir. 1991).

[4] Clouse, Thomas (May 1, 2006). "Man pleads guilty to bogus crime". The Spokesman-Review. p. A1. Retrieved September 23, 2014.

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