THE IMPORTANCE OF A DEFENDANT PLEADING GUILTY IN CRIMINAL PROSECUTION

Abstract

A plea of guilty by the accused has a double legal nature, because it is at the same time the means of defence by the accused, but also the evidence taken in account by the court when establishing the facts which they evaluate according to their own beliefs.

The authors of this paper deal with the statement in which an individual acknowledges his guilt in the commission of a crime as a specific kind of statement by the accused being a party in the criminal act prosecution. This defendant's statement may be given in such a way that it either refutes the allegations or accepts them. When the defendant in his statement partially or completely accepts the accusation, his statement contains a plea of guilty.

A plea of guilty is a special kind of statement by the accused in which he confirms that he has committed a crime or that some fact harmful for him is true. The plea of guilty may be complete or partial, depending on whether the defendant accepts the allegations completely (complete acknowledgment) or only some of the allegations while refuting the others (partial acknowledgement). Also, one can make a difference between a simple and qualified plea of guilty, depending on whether the defendant pleas guilty without any reserve (simple plea of guilty) or along with his guilty plea he also underlines some circumstance which, if it exists, excludes the commitment of the criminal act. The plea of guilty may be true or false. A false guilty plea also includes a confession of an offence of minor significance in order to cover serious crime chargeable to the defendant. There is a difference between a voluntary plea of guilty and plea of guilty when the defendant is pressed by the evidence, the so called 'unavoidable' plea of guilty, plea of guilty due to base motives or altruistic motives, and, finally, depending on the stage of criminal prosecution, plea of guilty during investigation and at main hearing.

The authors of this paper analyse material and legal regulations which encourage guilty pleas. In court practice, plea of guilty by the defendant, whether it is complete or partial, is significant as extenuating circumstance in sentencing and is treated as behaviour of the criminal offender after committing the crime. To support the attitude that not every plea of guilty may have a character of mitigating circumstance, the authors present, as an example, the judgement by the Appeal Court in Belgrade, by which the first-instance judgement by the Municipal Court is changed in the part relating to the criminal sanction. Unlike plea of guilty which may, depending on the concrete case, have a mitigating character during sentencing, plea of not guilty or nolo contendere cannot be treated as aggravating circumstance.

In this paper, the authors also analyze the legal and criminal proceedings regulations which encourage a plea of guilty. The fact is that the defendant's guilty plea makes the work of the judicial system easier and contributes to conducting a more efficient procedure. Because of that, the Criminal Code contains many regulations which encourage a defendant's guilty plea. In a regular procedure, such a plea may lead to the reduction of the evidence hearing, and to milder sentencing or sentencing milder criminal sanctions on a separate hearing. The Criminal Code also provides the instrument of agreement on the guilty plea to a crime, whose making is not any more conditioned with the severity of the sentence, and it may be concluded at any time before the end of the main hearing. However, this guilty plea should meet certain requirements, i.e. it should be complete, non-contradictory, clear and in harmony with other evidence, keeping in mind, of course, a general prohibition to force the plea.

Finally, this paper deals with pleas that are forced by certain means used for that purpose, and also with the regulations which ban such kinds of guilty pleas by the defendant. The authors in particular stress the inadmissibility of forced pleas, and the consequences of the pleas forced this way may be seen in the sentence by the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Stanimirovic vs. Serbia.