School me please,I have no clue how this works. if Cory is pleading guilty, is there a chance that he's come to an arrangement with the prosecution?
okay this is the most surface level explanation
most of the time to end up in bigboy court you need a grand jury indictment... however there is weird legal thing called "an information" which thankfully someone on wikiedia explained better than i can...
Because the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution expressly creates a constitutional right to be indicted by a grand jury, the information is used in federal criminal procedure only when a defendant voluntarily pleads guilty (often as part of a plea bargain) and waives the right to an indictment.[10]
However, the Fifth Amendment right to a grand jury indictment does not apply against the state governments because the grand jury provision has not been incorporated against the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, the information has always been the dominant charging document in the western U.S. states, where extremely dispersed population distribution during the American frontier era made it difficult to select and convene petit juries to hold trials. In that era, convening even larger grand juries just to indict criminals was seen as an unnecessary extravagance.
In western U.S. states, district attorneys are authorized by statute to charge criminal suspects by filing informations. The defendant is then entitled to challenge the information at a preliminary hearing, during which the prosecution must establish to the judge's satisfaction that probable cause exists to bind over the defendant until trial.
The grand jury is still available in the states where informations are used, but it is usually used only for issuing indictments for certain types of crimes or for certain types of anti-corruption investigations.
so you have that and here we have have someone pleading directly to an amended information. that means the charges were amended without contest. sometime they amend up but here i would wager they amended down to something both sides were comfortable with... which is why he plead to them at that same hearing
which leads to another crossroads
they might have amended the charges on a just a condition to plea. they might have desperate sentences (unagreed) to argue. BUT they might have an agreed upon dispo and sentences in mind (which could include different types of dispositions beyond guilty) in mind.
now it goes even deeper. a "conviction" has two parts
1. a finding of fact
2. a restraint on liberty
there are dozens of weird ways you can have one without the other. its a way that mandatory minimums are often avoided and long term repercussions (such as immigration issues) get kicked to the side. so he he might give an Alford Plea, he might assent to a general continuance (essentially indefinite waiver of your speedy trial right). Like i said before, its really impossible to guess on this one.
Topic: Cory Kennedy enters guilty plea (Read 34002 times)