Meaning
A negotiated agreement in a criminal case under which the defendant agrees to plead guilty or no contest in exchange for prosecutorial concessions - a reduced charge, a lighter sentencing recommendation, or dismissal of other counts - so resolving the case without a trial. Dominant in US criminal justice - roughly 90 percent of American criminal cases end in a deal rather than a trial. British usage prefers plea bargaining for the practice and often treats the whole idea as a controversial American import. Cop a plea is the informal form. Regional use: Chiefly North American English originally; now used wherever negotiated guilty pleas exist.
Origin
An American label for a practice that long predates it. The OED's earliest evidence for the noun plea bargain is from 1961, in Michigan Reports; for the gerund noun plea bargaining the OED gives 1940 while Merriam-Webster says 1932 - a rare explicit disagreement between the dictionaries. The practice flourished in Prohibition-era America: federal prosecutions under the Prohibition Act terminated in 1930 numbered nearly eight times the pending federal prosecutions of 1914, and over 90 percent of convictions were based on plea bargaining by 1930. The Supreme Court settled its constitutionality in Brady v. United States (1970), and Santobello v. New York (1971) added that when plea bargains are broken, legal remedies exist. England and Wales exclude formal sentence bargaining, relying instead on judge-set guilty-plea discounts - a long-running British discomfort with the American practice.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- cop a plea
- plea agreement
- plea bargaining
- plea deal
Usage Examples
- Prosecutors offered a plea bargain: five years on the lesser charge instead of twenty at trial.
- Her lawyer urged her to accept the plea bargain rather than risk a mandatory life sentence.
- Critics argue that the plea bargain pressures innocent defendants to confess just to avoid the gamble of trial.