Plea bargaining and its application: An appraisal

The Criminal Justice System has been constituted by the state to protect the rights of innocent and punish the guilty. But the system is not capable to cope with the pending cases and it has become ineffective; a large number of guilty go unpunished or the system takes years to bring the guilty to justice. Crime is increasing rapidly every day and with the increase in number of crimes pendency is also increasing. To provide the inexpensive and speedy justice the concept of plea bargaing was incorporated in Indian Criminal Justice System. Plea bargaing is pretrial negotiation between accused and prosecution during which the accused agrees to plead guilty in exchange of certain concession by prosecutor. It is a voluntarily procedure to dispose of case under the supervision of Court. The Plea bargaining aimed at quickly reducing the number of under-trial prisoners and increasing the number of convictions as well as to increase efficiency. The basic idea is to provide speedy and affordable justice to the litigants. This paper aims to analyse the concept of plea bargaining and its application in our Criminal Justice System.