If a person is given the chance of pleading guilty or innocent. Why would someone choose to plead innocent if pleading guilty gives a lesser punishment.
What happens if they plead innocent? Does the case remain open?
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I am a lawyer with experience as both a prosecutor and a criminal defense lawyer, and it’s my opinion the comments here so far are missing the bullseye.
The name of the first hearing in a criminal case varies across courts, but typically it’s called an “arraignment” or “initial hearing,” and that’s where the court requires the defendant to plead “guilty” or “not guilty.” A few thoughts from my perspective and experience:
– In the American criminal justice system, a criminal defendant is innocent until proven guilty. Practically speaking, this means that the government/prosecutor has the legal burden of producing evidence to convict a defendant. People have it wrong when they say that a defendant *pleads innocent* because that’s not what they’re doing (literally nor conceptually) — it’s more helpful to think of “pleading not guilty” as simply “*not* pleading guilty,” meaning that they’re exercising their Constitutional right to make the government meet its burden of proving the defendant’s guilt. I wish everybody understood that *pleading not guilty* really has nothing to do with a defendant’s belief that they’re guilty or innocent — only that they’re exercising their Constitutional right to make the government prove guilt using admissible evidence.
– Along those same lines, judges will often enter a “not guilty” plea on behalf of a defendant when the defendant is unable to enter a plea (e.g. because they are not in a mental state that allows them to comprehend the proceedings, or because the jail failed to transport the defendant but the judge, prosecutor, and defense counsel all want to get the case moving along). A “not guilty” plea can really be thought of as the starting pistol of a track and field event — the case really doesn’t start until an initial plea has been entered.
– It’s possible to plead guilty at the initial hearing, but for a few reasons this virtually never happens; to list a few: (1) At the time of the initial hearing the prosecutor typically hasn’t disclosed their evidence to the defense yet, and in fact in many cases a prosecutor hasn’t even been assigned to the case or reviewed the case file yet — so even if the defendant did want to plead guilty at the initial hearing, the prosecution may not actually want that to happen yet. (2) Since the defense typically hasn’t yet received the evidence at the time of the initial hearing, they also haven’t yet had time to review the evidence and file motions to exclude any evidence that was arguably obtained unconstitutionally or may otherwise be inadmissible. A not guilty plea gets the case moving, and typically a few weeks later the prosecutor discloses their evidence and the case moves along from there. (3) Even if a defendant knows they did the crime and believes that the prosecutor very likely has admissible evidence to prove it, pleading guilty “to the bench” (i.e. without a plea agreement in place) means that you’re failing to use your leverage to get a better sentence — prosecutors are often very busy and don’t have time to take every case to trial, so they may offer a plea agreement with a lighter sentence because they don’t want to go to trial, or they may outright dismiss a case because they want to use their prosecutorial discretion to simply not prosecute a particular case (e.g. possession of a small amount of marijuana) because they don’t think their community will be improved by potentially ruining a defendant’s life just because they had a little weed in their possession.
Tl;dr: A “not guilty” plea doesn’t mean anything interesting, and has basically no legal significance except that the defendant (1) is competent to understand the proceedings and (2) doesn’t want to make the foolish decision to admit guilt before seeing the evidence against them and trying to get the charges reduced or dismissed.
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