Plea Bargaining — A Comparative Study of India with Foreign Countries

Abstract

Plea bargaining has become more popular as a means of settling court issues all around the world. Plea bargaining’s application, scope, and operation change significantly between common law and civil law regimes. To analyze these differences in regard to different jurisdictions, a comparison between India and the USA (their plea bargaining) has been done in this study. The relative benefits and drawbacks of plea bargaining are up for debate. This is because it is argued that plea bargaining calls into question the primary goals of a trial, which are to establish the truth and uphold justice. It is without dispute that India needs a framework for speedy justice administration. Indian courts are being battered by the rise in criminal cases. Prisons are now overflowing with inmates who are being held without a trial due to the ongoing delays in case resolution. India has developed plea bargaining (as a response to this sad status of the judicial system), which was acknowledged as a trustworthy strategy for concluding open cases and accelerating the criminal justice system. According to the then-Chief Justice of India, Y. K. Sabharwal (2005—2007), the introduction of plea bargaining in India would not only expedite the criminal justice system but also serve as a restorative form of justice where victims would be equal stakeholders and receive sufficient compensation. However, despite years of conceptualization, the Indian criminal justice system has yet to adopt plea bargaining. The paper attempts to research whether plea bargaining in India in its present form and structure is adequate to achieve that goal by weighing its advantages and disadvantages in the context of the Indian judicial system. Given the above, it is proposed to introduce changes to this contemporary dispute resolution mechanism.