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September 22, 2006

Law professor says secrecy bred controversy over plea

A law professor at Roger Williams University says the controversy swirling around the Derderians' plea agreement highlights the downside of negotiating deals in secret.

The plea agreement with Michael and Jeffrey Derderian in The Station nightclub fire case was negotiated between the defense and the prosecution and in chambers with the judge.

Indeed, the vast majority of Superior Court cases end with a plea agreement, said David M. Zlotnick, a professor at the Ralph R. Papitto School of Law at Roger Williams University.

It can be an efficient way to bring cases to closure. But there’s a downside, and Rhode Island is witnessing that right now, Zlotnick said today.

“Now the danger is: People are saying, ‘I didn’t say that,’ ‘I didn’t mean that,’” he said. “That’s the downside of allowing an informal system with judge participation. The downside is that sometimes people disagree about what happened in chambers and there’s no court reporter in chambers and we don’t know what happened.”

That wouldn’t have happened if this were a federal court case, Zlotnick said, because federal judges are not permitted to engage in plea-bargaining in closed chambers.

“I was a federal prosecutor. Not once in my career was I ever in a backroom with a judge deciding what would happen later,” Zlotnick said.

-- projo.com staff writer Kate Bramson

Posted by Kate Bramson  at 10:50 AM | Permalink

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