Criminal Justice System: Is Plea Bargain Desirable?

Criminal Justice System: Is Plea Bargain Desirable?

"The controversy trailing the concept of Plea-bargain in the nation’s criminal justice system is not likely to end soon. Those who are kicking against it claim that it is unknown to our legal system. However, those in support of it insist it has always been with us. But what exactly is it all about?


According to the Black’s Law Dictionary, plea bargain is the process whereby the accused and the prosecutor in a criminal case work out a mutually satisfactory disposition of the case, subject to court approval.

It involves the defendant entering guilty plea to a lesser offence or to only one or some of the counts of a multi-count indictment, in return for a lighter sentence than that possible for the graver charge.

Specifically, there are three kinds of plea bargain: the ‘Charge Bargain’ which entails the prosecutor allowing the accused to plead guilty to a lesser charge or to some of the charges preferred against him or her, which typically occur or negotiated at the pre-trial phase.

A ‘Sentence Bargain’ is offered when the defendant is told in advance what the sentence will be if he or she pleads guilty.
The third but rare type is ‘Fact Bargain’ which involves the defendant admitting to certain facts in return for agreement for the prosecutor not to introduce certain facts into evidence before the trial court.
Nevertheless, in the Nigerian milieu, though plea bargaining is not expressly recognized in our criminal justice system, however, what was hitherto practiced by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, is a process wherein the accused person changes his plea of ‘not guilty’ to ‘guilty’ after which the prosecution offers such person some concession by way of amending his charge.
Though it was white collar crime that brought the concept of plea bargaining into our public consciousness, controversy has continued to trail its origin and applicability vis-à-vis the administration of justice in the country.

One of the vocal voices against the plea bargain system is the Chief Justice of Nigeria, CJN, Justice Dahiru Musdapher, who had on November 14, last year, described plea bargain as “a novel concept of dubious origin.”
The debate resurrected again on Monday, as the CJN, in a paper he presented at a 2-days capacity building workshop for judicial correspondents in Abuja, maintained that the concept was “never part of the history of our legal system- at least until it was surreptitiously smuggled into our statutory laws with the creation of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.”
Justice Musdapher stated this on a day both the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, and the National Human Rights Commission, NHRC, challenged his viewpoint on the issue, saying his “claim that the plea-bargain system was unknown to the Nigerian law did not fairly reflect the state of the law.”
Justifying his decision to abolish the system which he said was obnoxious, the CJN argued: “when I described the concept as of ‘dubious origin’, I was not referring to the original raison-d’être or the juridical motive behind its conception way back either in the United States or England in the early 19th Century, I was referring to the sneaky motive-if not behind its introduction into our legal system, then evidently in its fraudulent application."