Question: What Is A Plea In Savannah?
Answer: Basically there are different kinds of pleas. You can plead guilty, although I would never recommend just a straight guilty plea. You can plead not guilty, and that, obviously, will set up for either a bench or a jury trial. You can plead what they call nolo contendere, and that’s a very minor thing. That usually is reserved for certain traffic offenses, certain minor drug charges like, say, possession of marijuana less than a gram. You can’t use nolo for everything, and there’s a limit in most cases for how often you can use it, so you kind of want to preserve that. Most of the time when you do plead guilty, as I said, you don’t want to just plead it right off the hand. You can actually bargain with the prosecutor and just say, you know, “Here’s the strengths of our case, here are the weaknesses of yours.” And a lot of times you can get charges lessened that way. You can get, say, a DUI bumped down to reckless driving or something that won’t have such a stigma. So, there’s certainly a lot of benefits to having somebody who is an effective plea bargainer and negotiator.