Guilty Pleas and the Changing Role of the Prosecutor in French Criminal Justice
18 Pages Posted: 1 Aug 2010 Last revised: 7 Nov 2012
Date Written: July 29, 2010
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.
Keywords: French prosecutor, criminal procedure, plea bargaining
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