PLEA BARGAINING IN INDIA – A DECADE OF EXISTENCE
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Abstract
The rise of plea bargaining is generally taken to begin in the 19th century but it actually dates back hundreds of years to the advent of confession law and has probably existed for more than eight centuries. Legal technicalities in adversarial system of jurisprudence resulted in causing delays in court procedures and often it became a challenging task for prosecutors to secure convictions for guilty defendants. Moreover, people remained under detention due to legal technicalities and delays in judgments of criminal cases. To alleviate these problems, United States became the pioneer in implementing the concept of plea bargaining. The number of federal convictions resulting from pleas of guilty rose from 50% to 72% during the first two decades of the 20th century. Though plea-bargaining rates rose significantly, appellate courts were still reluctant to approve such deals when appealed. Plea Bargaining emerged as a compromise to ensure that criminals were appropriately punished consistent with the policy of the law to ensure that punishment not only serves as deterrent to offenders, but has to be in the societal interest too. That the concept is very well accepted in USA and some of the Common Law countries is very well demonstrated by the fact that bulk of the cases are solved using the principle of Plea Bargaining and, in general, people tend to have faith in the system as fair and transparent practices are followed. From available statistics, 95% of criminal convictions in the United States have come from plea bargain otherwise known as negotiated pleas.
Plea bargain was introduced into the Indian legal system in 2006. The procedure is applicable in criminal proceedings involving offences which do and attract a punishment of more than 7 years. However, property offences in the nature of socio-economic crimes such as the looting of the public treasury and offences committed against a woman or a child less than 14 years of age are excluded from the application of the procedure
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