Guilty Pleas and the Changing Role of the Prosecutor in French Criminal Justice

Abstract:     
As in many other jurisdictions, the role of the French prosecutor (the procureur) has expanded over the last decades. The changes can be characterised as a transfer of power and functions away from the judicial to the prosecutorial in order to reduce costs and delay. This raises issues around the political independence of the pre-trial investigation, as well as the extent to which French criminal procedure is jettisoning traditional judicial safeguards associated with a more inquisitorial system and replacing them (or not) with due process protections associated with the adversarial two party conflict model.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 18

Keywords: French prosecutor, criminal procedure, plea bargaining

working papers series