Criminal defense lawyers are not magicians; they may not be able to persuade a jury to acquit you when evidence obviously connects you to a crime of which the state is accusing you. For example, if the surveillance camera video in a convenience store clearly shows you robbing the store, it is difficult to argue convincingly that you were not there or that the state violated your rights by using the surveillance camera footage as evidence. Despite this, the law gives you the right to fight until the end; if you think that there is even a modicum of reasonable doubt about your case, you have the right to attempt to persuade a jury of this, with the help of your criminal defense lawyer.
In practice, more than 90% of criminal cases that get as far as the defendant entering a plea end with the defendant pleading guilty. Defendants and their defense lawyers can only decide on a case-by-case basis whether it is a better idea to plead guilty or to fight the charges and go to trial. Our experienced defense attorneys can guide you through the New Jersey criminal process, help you prepare the best defenses if you decide to fight your charges and negotiate a plea agreement on your behalf if you decide to plead guilty, so that you can avoid long prison sentences and other excessive punishments.
Think Before You Enter a Plea
At your plea hearing, the judge must recite each of the charges the state of New Jersey has filed against you, and you must respond to each one by saying “guilty” or “not guilty.” If you plead guilty to all of the charges, the next step is sentencing, where the court orders you to comply with certain conditions as a punishment for the crime you have admitted to committing. Your sentence might include jail or prison time, probation, monetary fines, community service, court-ordered substance abuse treatment, or some combination thereof. If you plead not guilty, the next step is to prepare for a trial. You and your lawyer will decide which defenses to use, which witnesses to summon, and which documents and other items to show to the jury as evidence. The court will also need to select jurors to decide the verdict in your trial; this is a time-consuming process because the court must find 12 jurors it can trust to be unbiased, which requires them not to know you and not to have seen news reports about your charges if any were published.
You should decide well before your plea hearing whether you want to plead guilty or not guilty to the charges. In fact, it is a criminal defense lawyer’s worst nightmare if the defendant does not tell the defense lawyer how he or she intends to plead until the defendant actually enters the plea or if the defendant changes his or her mind shortly before the plea hearing. If you surprise your lawyer by pleading guilty, it means that your lawyer’s efforts to build your case for trial have gone to waste, and your lawyer has missed important opportunities to negotiate a plea deal. If you surprise your lawyer by pleading not guilty, the opposite is true. If you initially enter a plea of not guilty at your plea hearing, you have the right to change your guilty at any time before your trial.
How Do Plea Deals Happen?
Criminal trials are expensive, and in every case, at least some of the financial burden falls on the taxpayers. The state of New Jersey must always pay the prosecutors, and if the defendant cannot afford to hire his or her own criminal defense lawyer, the state must also pay public defenders to work on the case. Equally importantly, the punishments tend to be more severe after guilty verdicts at trial than after guilty pleas, and keeping people in prison or on probation is costly both for the state and for the defendants and their families.
When you face criminal charges, however, the public treasury is probably the farthest thing from your mind. When defendants plead guilty, it is usually because by doing so, they can avoid the worst punishments that the court would be allowed to impose if the defendant pleaded not guilty and then the jury returned a guilty verdict at trial.
What Can You Get if You Accept a Plea Deal?
In some cases, you can avoid jail or prison by pleading guilty, but some criminal charges contain a mandatory minimum prison sentence. If you plead guilty to one of these offenses, your prison sentence will be shorter than it would be after a conviction at trial. Before you enter a plea, your lawyer will spend several weeks, or even longer, negotiating with prosecutors to get you the lowest possible sentence in exchange for your guilty plea.
If you are facing charges for a misdemeanor, also known as a disorderly persons offense in New Jersey, and you agree to plead guilty, the state will usually agree to a sentence that does not include jail time. If you are facing a felony charge with a mandatory prison sentence, then your plea deal may involve the prosecution reducing the charges in exchange for a guilty plea. For example, if you are facing charges for drug trafficking, you might get a plea deal where the state will drop the drug trafficking charges if you plead guilty to drug possession and provide information to the state that will assist with an ongoing investigation into the drug trafficking operation.
Plea deals are not a magic wand that erases the consequences of actual harm, however; someone who inflicts a gunshot wound might get a plea deal that downgrades the charges from attempted murder to assault with a deadly weapon but not to a charge that does not involve prison time.
What Do You Lose if You Accept a Plea Bargain?
If you accept a plea deal, a criminal conviction goes on your record, and it is visible in background checks for employment and housing. Likewise, all defendants have the right to appeal their convictions, but it is much harder to win your appeal if you pleaded guilty than it would be if your conviction were the result of a jury’s decision after hearing evidence from both sides.
You should not plead guilty if you are innocent, but people do it all the time. Part of the reason for this is that public defenders have such a heavy caseload, at least twice that of criminal defense lawyers in private practice. Therefore, hastily arranged plea deals are practically their only option, except in cases where there is an obvious way to establish reasonable doubt. You always have the right to plead not guilty in a criminal case, even if your lawyer has made every effort to negotiate a plea deal and persuade you to plead guilty.
Contact a New Jersey Criminal Defense Lawyer Before You Consider Any Plea Agreement
A criminal defense lawyer can help you negotiate the best possible plea deal or to fight your charges. Contact the Law Offices of Jonathan F. Marshall to discuss your case.
