The Guilty Plea

Guilty plea is different from confession,confession at court and criminal selfadmission.Confession belong to the category of evidence and have the attribute of proving the facts of the case.The self-admitted fact can be directly used as the basis of judgment,so it belongs to the category of proving method and has the attribute of confirming the fact of a case.The guilty plea should belong to the category of judgment method,that is,the judge can make judgment directly according to the guilty plea.The guilty plea is parallel with the criminal trial,and both of them have the litigation attribute of judging guilt.The review procedure of guilty plea can not be equated with criminal trial.The case is solved by guilty plea,and there is no trial in the real sense.Thus a guilty confession as evidence can only simplify a trial,while the procedural effect of a guilty plea is to circumvent(or preclude)a trial.In other words,whether admitting charges will have the legal effect of evading trial directly determines whether there is a true guilty plea in China,and the quick-judgment procedure is a typical example of evading trial.Quick-judgment procedures shall be applied to adjudicate cases without court investigation and court debate in principle.The way to avoid the trial is to obtain the guilty plea through the negotiation procedure,solve the conviction and sentencing,eliminate the lawsuit contention,and finally ensure the binding force of the guilty plea agreement to the judge.Circumvention of trial follows an efficiency-oriented consequentialism approach,that is,it should bypass trial but achieve the same effect as trial,so as to establish a new balance between crime control and due process in the criminal justice system.The trial circumvention effect of guilty plea leads to the dual track system of criminal procedure,one side is the trial-centered procedure,the other side is the lawsuit centered on guilty plea.First,in terms of the way of case fact determination,the former adopts the judicial way of fact determination,the latter adopts the administrative way of fact determination.Second,in terms of the way of procedure,the former includes three stages of investigation and prosecution and trial,and the latter includes three aspects of obtaining(accepting)review and withdrawal of guilty plea.Third,in terms of the structure relationship of the subject of litigation,the former judge in a dominant position,the prosecutor is usually in a dominant position In addition,in terms of double-track internal structure,pleas review procedure and trial procedure of alternative relations,investigation and interrogation guilty plea and access program(plea trade)may appear between the three,namely the relations At the same time,there is inevitable tension or conflict in the structure of dual track litigation,which is mainly manifested in three aspects: the migration of litigation object breaks the division of litigation functions and the conflict of self-imputation.Guilty pleas are not always the result of a deal or negotiation,but it is common practice to obtain guilty pleas through sentencing concessions.Plea deals are not always the result of direct or public negotiations.They can also be reached by tacit means.Based on reasonable trust,the criminal suspect and the defendant believe that as long as they confess their crimes,they will get a certain penalty reduction,and they will voluntarily confess their crimes without the other party’s explicit commitment and expect to get sentencing preference.The main reason for the rise of implied transaction in China is that the core of "plea bargain" in China lies in obtaining a guilty confession,rather than admitting guilty plea in the sense of admitting charges.In accordance with the criminal lawsuit of our country tradition,admitted charges will not be exempted from the judge trial of the obligation,to obtain through direct negotiation or negotiation admitted charges in the sense of guilty plea and has no practical meaning and effect,and the more subtle ways to obtain a confession is a core concerns,and thus formed the "slow reply" path.Although implied trading is subtle and gentle,it has inherent drawbacks.Implicit transactions in the closed environment of investigation and interrogation may not be more fair and transparent than explicit transactions.By guilty plea,the accused waives most of his trial rights and loses the due process protections that trial provides.In the dual track litigation structure,we should provide basic equal due process protection for the accused according to the principle of functional equivalence.In order to provide relative procedural protection,we should follow the framework of "selective due process" to ensure the effectiveness of guilty plea and safeguard the procedural interests of the accused.Selective due process includes two aspects: one is voluntary choice to exclude inappropriate intervention;The second is informed consent,understanding the nature and consequences of the behavior.Therefore,the right to counsel and the right to disclose information about the case(discovery)are rights that cannot be waived by a guilty plea.The resolution of the case by a guilty plea should also be roughly equivalent to the outcome of a trial.The mere presence of a lawyer providing legal help does not necessarily mean that voluntary will be achieved.This simple inference leaves out an important aspect of voluntary judgment,namely whether there was inappropriate intervention.The imposition of conditional threats by one party on the other party,so that the threatened party has no reasonably viable alternative but to comply with the threat of the other party,will trigger involuntary acts.By introducing the theoretical context of philosophical research,this paper uses the baseline theory of compulsive judgment and the doublelayer theory of voluntary judgment to solve the voluntary nature of guilty plea.A plea bargain or negotiation is allowed only if the evidence is reasonably strong;The existence of an inappropriate threat can only be ruled out if the prosecutor’s proposal meets the proportionality of the penalty.