Plea Bargaining – the Solution to Problems of Evidence in Economic Offences?
Abstract
According to Catherine Elliot and Frances Quinn, “plea bargaining is the name given to negotiations between the prosecution and defence lawyers over the outcome of a case; for example, where a defendant is choosing to plead not guilty, the prosecution may offer to reduce the charge to a similar offence with a smaller maximum sentence, in return for the defendant pleading guilty.”
Even though the plea bargaining system is widely used in the US criminal system, the concept is quite unknown to the Finnish legal system.
The object of my study is to evaluate whether the plea bargaining system could provide an alternative approach to problems of evidence in general and in economic offences in particular. The basis of my study and the underlying question is the following: is it possible to adopt the plea bargaining system to the Finnish criminal procedure as such. First I focus on the similarities between the Finnish criminal procedure and the Anglo-American plea bargaining system. Secondly, I try to provide a “Finnish plea bargaining system” that could be fitted in to our current system without difficulties.
At a very early stage of my study, I became convinced that the doctrine cannot be adopted as such since it is contradictory to several fundamental principles of our system. The foremost principles are 1) the principle of legality, 2) the principle of judicial investigation, 3) the principle of objective consideration (which the prosecutor is bound to) and finally 4) the principle concerning the complainant’s strong status in the Finnish criminal procedure.
The current Finnish system already allows the application of several features of the plea bargaining system and yet they are not applied by the prosecutors. I therefore strongly recommend that the negotiations procedures should be taken into use between the parties. It is my belief that negotiations between the prosecution and defendant would diminish the problems of evidence discussed in this article.
