Plea bargain is an indicator of the development of a country’s criminal justice system. A country that does not have plea bargain is a country that lacks a developed justice system.
It is absolutely essential because when you file about three to five charges against a person and one is extremely serious while the others are not too serious, you may find that in the process of investigation, you don’t have conclusive evidence for the most serious charge but you have sufficiently convincing evidence for the less serious charges, what a plea bargain does is that the person will agree to plead guilty to the less serious one and receive sanction for it.
The reason for this is that if you go on a wild goose chase over the major charge, the case may go on for a long time and you spend a lot of resources on prosecuting the matter and at the end, the case may be lost and this doesn’t make sense.
Every civilised country has it including the United States and Britain. Another instance is where a person has been charged with looting billions of naira and the normal punishment would have been five years.
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