The Plea Bargaining Blog

It seems there have been a number of interesting plea bargains recently, and I've compiled a list below describing some of the big ones. (1) The DOJ announced on Tuesday that two DOD contractors pleaded guilty to various conspiracy charges related to their business of providing fuel supply services. Paul Wilkinson and Christopher Cartwright, who were scheduled to begin trial today, entered into plea agreements filed in the U.S. District Court in Baltimore. Wilkinson pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the United States, to commit wire fraud, and to steal trade secrets by hiring another individual, Matthew Bittenbender, to steal those trade secrets from his employer, Avcard. Avcard is a division of Kropp Holdings Inc., a Hunt Valley, Md., company which provides fuel and fuel services to commercial and government aircraft. Wilkinson used the inside information to underbid Avcard at every location where the companies were bidding against each other, thereby subverting DOD's c...

Continuing our series regarding amnesty and truth commissions as a form of plea bargaining, the BBC had an interesting story regarding Bangladesh's new Truth and Accountability Commission. A Truth and Accountability Commission has been set up in Bangladesh to tackle the country's endemic corruption. The interim government says it will offer partial amnesties in return for information about corrupt deals. Critics say the terms of reference are unclear and the commission will achieve little before December polls when the government is due to relinquish power. Bangladesh remains one of the world's most corrupt countries, according to watchdog Transparency International. Last month, the group said corruption in the country had continued to thrive since the army-backed caretaker government took power last year pledging to tackle it. Leniency Justice Habibur Rahman Khan has been appointed to chair the new three-member commission. Former Comptroller and Accountant General Asif ...

According to the DOJ , Cecelia Grimes, a former lobbyist and close friend of former U.S. representative Curt Weldon, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court on Friday to charges related to the attempted destruction of evidence in a federal investigation. According to press accounts , Grimes was visited by the FBI in 2006 regarding its investigation of Congressman Weldon. During that meeting, Grimes was presented with two grand jury subpoenas seeking records. Six days later, Grimes placed responsive documents in a trash bag and placed the bag in front of her house for garbage pickup. FBI agents then retrieved the garbage bag and located the documents, which were never produced to law enforcement authorities. Evidence presented at the plea hearing also showed that Grimes placed her blackberry devise in a trash can near a fast food restaurant to prevent the FBI from reviewing its contents. Grimes faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. Obstruction of justice i...

There has been much talk during the last week about the arrest of Radovan Karadzic in Serbia, the request by the ICC for an arrest warrant for Sudan's president, and the start of the first American war crimes trial since WWII. See here , here , here , and here . For the purposes of this blog, I thought we should ask the following - What role does plea bargaining play in international crimes prosecutions? To that end, I found an interesting article by Nancy A. Combs, entitled " Procuring Guilty Pleas for International Crimes: The Limited Influence of Sentence Discounts ," 59 Vand. L. Rev. 69 (2006). Here is the article's conclusion. The relatively straightforward relationship between sentencing discounts and guilty pleas just described does not exist in the context of international crimes. Although some international defendants rely on sentence-based calculations when deciding whether or not to plead guilty, for a substantial proportion of international defendants curr...

Former Engineered Support Systems Inc. Chief Executive and co-founder Michael Shanahan Sr. pleaded guilty today to one of twelve federal charges related to backdating company options. As part of the deal, he agreed to pay almost $7.9 million back to his former company. One article regarding the plea deal includes an interesting discussion of backdating investigations generally. In court filings, federal prosecutors in St. Louis called the Engineered Support case "one of the most egregious examples of backdating among all of the publicly traded companies in the United States. It strains mathematical formulas to calculate the likelihood of randomly selecting the lowest date within a quarter to issue stock options ... and to do it eight times in a row." While hundreds of companies and executives have been investigated for backdating, only a handful of those probes have led to criminal charges. The Engineered Support case is the only one outside San Francisco or New York to see ...

The Times in South Africa had an interesting piece on Sunday regarding plea bargaining. The article was entitled "The Case for Plea Bargaining," and the author, the director of the Institute for Security Studies in Cape Town, described not only the forces influencing the plea bargaining debate in South Africa, but the way similar debates have evolved around the world. In a study into the use of plea bargaining in South Africa, the South African Law Commission concluded that it “performs an important part in our criminal justice system”. . . While the use of legitimate discretionary powers by prosecutors continues to provoke controversy here and abroad, their power to make such deals has been repeatedly upheld by courts. The US Supreme Court has held that “if every criminal charge were subject to a full-scale trial, the states and federal government would need to multiply by many times the number of judges and court facilities”. The overwhelming justification for the use of ...

Yesterday, a court in Brevard County, Florida held a special "plea rocket docket" session. The special plea bargaining event was designed to quickly move 88 non-violent misdemeanor offenders off the dockets and out of an overcrowded jail. The judge conducting the event specifically reminded the participants not to accept a plea agreement just to get out of jail, stating, "We want to go fast, but we don't want to slaughter anyone's due process."  Court appearances at the county jail usually are somber sessions filled with bitter hand-wringing and looks filled with regret. Friday was a little different. A specially scheduled "rocket docket" meant to expedite plea deals between nonviolent misdemeanor offenders and the state -- before regularly scheduled court dates -- resulted in 88 inmates going home, as well as a standing ovation when Circuit Judge George Maxwell was finished at 10:42 a.m. There were lots of smiles. . . . Chief Judge Clayton Simmons...