Judge Rakoff and Professor Garrett on Deferred Prosecution Agreements
Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) are now a common aspect of the corporate criminal enforcement landscape. While DPAs do not result in a criminal conviction for the corporation, these types of agreements share many of the same characteristics as plea bargains. In a recent article featured in the New York Review of Books , Judge Jed Rakoff discusses a recent book published by Professor Brandon Garrett entitled Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations . From Judge Rakoff's review: So-called “deferred prosecutions” were developed in the 1930s as a way of helping juvenile offenders. A juvenile who had been charged with a crime would agree with the prosecutor to have his prosecution deferred while he entered a program designed to rehabilitate such offenders. If he successfully completed the program and committed no other crime over the course of a year, the charge would then be dropped. The analogy of a Fortune 500 company to a juvenile delinque...