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Plea Bargain

The CIA And The 9/11 Plea Deals

August 3, 2024 John Kiriakou, Consortium News. , , , , ,
The U.S. Defense Department announced Wednesday that Khalid Shaikh Muhammad (KSM), the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as two co-defendants, had agreed to plead guilty to multiple charges of terrorism and would escape execution, serving consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole instead. The agreement brings to an end, at least for KSM, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, an odyssey through uncharted and unprecedented Defense Department legal territory. The announcement led to mixed feelings from many of the 9/11 victim families, human rights activists and the legal community, and there are certainly lessons to be learned.

Assange Agreed To Destroy Unpublished Classified Material

June 28, 2024 Joe Lauria, Consortium News. , , ,
The 23-page plea deal between Julian Assange and the United States government that freed Assange this week contains a provision that he agree to return or destroy all unpublished  U.S. material still in WikiLeaks‘ possession. The agreement says on Page 29: “Before his plea is entered in Court, the Defendant shall take all action within his control to cause the return to the United States or the destruction of any such unpublished information in his possession, custody, or control, or that of WikiLeaks or any affiliate of WikiLeaks. The Defendant further agrees that, if the forgoing obligation requires him to instruct the editor(s) of WikiLeaks to destroy any such information or otherwise cause it to be destroyed, he shall provide the United States (or cause to be provided to the United States) a sworn affidavit confirming the instruction he provided and that, he will, in good faith, seek to facilitate compliance with that instruction prior to sentencing.”

The Plea Bargain Originated To Undermine Working-Class Solidarity

August 25, 2022 Dan Canon, Truthout. , , ,
The U.S. criminal legal system is terrible by so many metrics: We lock up more people than anywhere else in the world, our penalties tend to be harsher, our arrest rates are many times higher than other democracies, and so on. Plea bargaining is not often at the top of the list when we think of all harm done by the system, but the U.S. is an outlier in this area as well. More than 95 percent of all American criminal cases end in a guilty plea, mostly due to bargained agreements, making our plea-deal rate much higher than that of any other country in the world. In my book Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Criminal Class, I argue that the widespread use of plea bargaining is a chief enabler of our criminal legal system’s ills.

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