The Plea Bargaining Blog

According to the AJC , Michael Vick, who is currently serving a 23 month federal prison sentence on felony charges related to dogfighting, pleaded guilty to related charges in Virginia state court on Tuesday. Vick is currently serving his federal sentence at Leavenworth prison and is scheduled for release on July 20, 2009. Vick pleaded guilty to a state dogfighting charge Tuesday in a Virginia courtroom. Under a plea agreement, the Falcons quarterback received a three-year suspended prison term and a $2,500 fine on a charge of attending, sponsoring and participating in dog fights. A charge of cruelty to animals with prejudice was dismissed. He also received four years’ probation. The fine will be suspended if Vick pays court costs and keeps the terms of the probation. The charges against Vick carried a maximum sentence of 10 years. After accepting the plea, Surry County Circuit Court Judge Samuel E. Campbell allowed Vick to speak. A stoic Vick, dressed in a gray suit, paused and then s...

Conrad Black , who once presided over the world's third-largest newspaper empire, is currently serving a 78 month prison sentence in the United States after being convicted on three counts of fraud and one count of obstruction of justice related to improper diversion of company funds for personal benefit. Black recently discussed life behind bars and the U.S. criminal justice system in London's Sunday Times . I write to you from a US federal prison. It is far from a country club or even a regimental health spa. I work quite hard but fulfillingly, teaching English and the history of the United States to some of my co-residents. There is practically unlimited access to e-mails and the media and plenty of time for visitors. Many of the other co-residents are quite interesting and affable, often in a Damon Runyon way, and the regime is not uncivilised. In eight months here there has not been the slightest unpleasantness with anyone. It is a little like going back to boarding scho...

According to the Korea Times , South Korea is considering implementation of a plea bargaining system, and the lead prosecutor has stated that the system would initially be utilized for corruption cases. If these plans move forward, this will offer a unique opportunity to observe a criminal justice system's implementation of plea bargaining from the beginning. The prosecution is seeking to adopt plea-bargaining for corruption cases. Prosecutor General Lim Chae-jin stressed the importance of criminal law reform, including the introduction of a plea bargaining system, at the prosecution's 60th anniversary ceremony held in southern Seoul, Friday. "It is time for Korea's judiciary to adopt plea-bargaining to a limited extent, such as in bribery cases, in order to effectively punish corruption, which is getting more complex,'' Lim said. Plea-bargaining is an agreement whereby the prosecution offers a lighter punishment to a criminal suspect in exchange for admitting...

According to Reuters , a former UBS executive has received a sentence of six and a half years in prison for his role in an what has been termed the most pervasive insider trading ring since the 1980s. The defendant, Mitchel Guttenberg, pleaded guilty in February 2008. Mitchel Guttenberg, a former institutional client manager in UBS' equity research department, admitted in a guilty plea in February to selling nonpublic information about the bank's stock recommendations. In handing down the sentence, which includes three years of supervision after his release, Judge Deborah Batts of U.S. District Court in Manhattan said, "from the moment he joined the (UBS) investment review committee he planned to give that information to others to use illegally." Batts did not fine Guttenberg, who expressed his remorse to his family, the court and his former employer. His lawyer Sean O'Shea described Guttenberg as "a broken man" whose wife had left him, and he was living...