5 - Private Criminal Settlements as Plea Bargains

Summary

This chapter examines the phenomenon of private criminal settlements, in which the alleged criminal gives the victim of the crime some consideration in exchange for keeping the incident out of the public criminal justice system. These agreements may occur between two private individuals who have (and wish to maintain) a preexisting relationship, such as when the victim and the perpetrator are family members. They may involve a corporate client of a private police officer who decides that referring the case to the public criminal justice system is too expensive and time consuming. The witness may not even be the victim of the crime; the witness could be a third party who either accidentally discovered evidence of the crime or actively sought the information in order to extract a payment from the perpetrator. The chapter sets out the motivations that lead individuals to enter these agreements and argues that these agreements offer benefits to society that outweight their costs. It also compares these agreements to public plea bargains, comparing the arguments for and against plea bargains with the arguments for and against private criminal settlements.