![]() ![]() Various government reports and commissions, particularly from England and Wales, attribute cracked trials to tactical defendants ‘playing the system’ in the hope that delaying their pleas may lead to a more favourable outcome, such as prosecutions failing because witnesses fail to appear or because the quality of evidence has deteriorated. The time and effort that court personnel have put in – judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers, and even law clerks and bailiffs, as well as witnesses and victims who have been summoned to appear – are wasted. #Sims 4 crack trial trialFootnote 2 This is said to ‘crack’ the trial because the trial has been rendered moot. But when a defendant pleads guilty after a trial date has been set, officials claim that this has the effect of squandering public resources. Footnote 1 For the state, guilty pleas free up court resources (which would otherwise be needed for lengthy trials), allow prosecutors to devote attention to other matters, and spare witnesses from having to testify and be reimbursed from the public purse. Guilty pleas are the primary mode of criminal case dispositions across common law jurisdictions. This study focuses exclusively on the latter because late guilty pleas have been singled out as a key problem in the administration of justice. ![]() It might involve the prosecution withdrawing all charges due to the witness’ failure to turn up and withdrawal of the evidence, or defendants entering a late guilty plea before or on the day of the trial. Cracked trials are trials that do not proceed on the scheduled day of trial and do not need to be rescheduled because the case has already reached an outcome for various reasons. In this article, we investigate the reasons for defendants’ decisions to change their pleas from the initial not guilty to guilty subsequently – a phenomenon that greatly contributes to ‘cracked trials’. #Sims 4 crack trial how toThe findings support the notion that it is the pressures of the criminal justice process that lead defendants to ‘crack’ and highlight the costs to defendants for decisions on how to plead that are influenced by considerations other than actual culpability. ![]() Subsequent interviews illustrate why these factors are salient. We find that defendants who were represented by publicly-funded lawyers or who were in prolonged pre-trial detention were more disposed to changing their pleas. A mixed methods approach of courtroom observations and interviews with defendants was adopted. The aim of the present study is to investigate the reasons for cracked trials in the Hong Kong context, insofar as the reasons for late guilty pleas can be investigated without the influence of reforms seen in other jurisdictions used to discourage late pleas. Various government reports attribute the main cause to tactical defendants playing the system, and reforms have been initiated to encourage early guilty pleas and strongly discourage late ones. ‘Cracked trials’, where defendants enter a late guilty plea after a trial date has been set, are considered a societal problem because public resources set aside for trials are wasted. ![]()
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