It is meaningless. It just signals to the court whether you intend to fight and whether or not the prosecution has to bother with the burden to prove a crime was committed.
But its also (illegally) used by judges to determine how much they want to punish someone, for the trouble. So if you plead not guilty but are guilty, they can hit you hard in sentencing....which is ridiculous, because it's always the burden of the prosecution to prove a crime was committed, and a person may be able to waive that for expediency, but it can't exactly be taken away entirely, otherwise that's the same as disallowing a person to have the right of being innocent until proven guilty.
The wording is innocent until PROVEN guilty. Not innocent until they say they are guilty. Of course you could say that a defendants own admittance of guilt is proof, and that's fine, but if they withdraw that admittance of guilt, then that's no different than having bad evidence, which wouldn't matter, because if the prosecution has other evidence of a crime than a guilty plea, they should just prosecute as normal, because the burden is still on them to prove guilt.
In a sick way, the only reasonable purpose of how it is now, is to entrap people that the prosecution may not have the goods on to truly prove guilt, to use it to scare them into a guilty plea.
A guilty plea should be able to be withdrawn at any time with NO kind of punishment. That might lead to some extra fuckery in the courts from defendants, but if prosecution has proven their case in a court, changing a plea to not guilty won't functionally change a thing about how the judicial system operates (or rather, should operate).
It's more like a move in game based on the goal of best net gain. If Flynn lied it was a white lie and stuff the FBI shouldn't have known or had their noses in. He actually did the best thing in that sense in forcing them to reveal their ill gotten hand.
Punishment for changing plea is unheard of in my books when the conditions change. If you're innocent but either the cost of pleading guilty is less than proving innocence or you believe a guilty verdict is inevitable then you plead guilty to reduce the harm inflicted by a wrong verdict.
Given exculpatory evidence was suppressed putting Flynn even more in the position of being at the mercy of the prosecution then go figure.
It is meaningless. It just signals to the court whether you intend to fight and whether or not the prosecution has to bother with the burden to prove a crime was committed.
But its also (illegally) used by judges to determine how much they want to punish someone, for the trouble. So if you plead not guilty but are guilty, they can hit you hard in sentencing....which is ridiculous, because it's always the burden of the prosecution to prove a crime was committed, and a person may be able to waive that for expediency, but it can't exactly be taken away entirely, otherwise that's the same as disallowing a person to have the right of being innocent until proven guilty.
The wording is innocent until PROVEN guilty. Not innocent until they say they are guilty. Of course you could say that a defendants own admittance of guilt is proof, and that's fine, but if they withdraw that admittance of guilt, then that's no different than having bad evidence, which wouldn't matter, because if the prosecution has other evidence of a crime than a guilty plea, they should just prosecute as normal, because the burden is still on them to prove guilt.
In a sick way, the only reasonable purpose of how it is now, is to entrap people that the prosecution may not have the goods on to truly prove guilt, to use it to scare them into a guilty plea.
A guilty plea should be able to be withdrawn at any time with NO kind of punishment. That might lead to some extra fuckery in the courts from defendants, but if prosecution has proven their case in a court, changing a plea to not guilty won't functionally change a thing about how the judicial system operates (or rather, should operate).
It's more like a move in game based on the goal of best net gain. If Flynn lied it was a white lie and stuff the FBI shouldn't have known or had their noses in. He actually did the best thing in that sense in forcing them to reveal their ill gotten hand.
Punishment for changing plea is unheard of in my books when the conditions change. If you're innocent but either the cost of pleading guilty is less than proving innocence or you believe a guilty verdict is inevitable then you plead guilty to reduce the harm inflicted by a wrong verdict.
Given exculpatory evidence was suppressed putting Flynn even more in the position of being at the mercy of the prosecution then go figure.