In common law countries, a defendant may enter a peremptory plea of autrefois acquit or autrefois convict ( autrefois means " previously " in French ), meaning the defendant has been acquitted or convicted of the same offence.

They are the plea of autrefois convict, the plea of autrefois acquit, and the plea of pardon.

A plea of autrefois convict can be combined with a plea of not guilty.

A plea of autrefois acquit ( Law French for " previously acquitted ") means the defendant claims to have been previously acquitted of the same offence, on substantially the same evidence, and that he or she therefore cannot be tried for it again.

A plea of autrefois acquit can be combined with a plea of not guilty.

* autrefois acquit, a peremptory plea that one has previously acquitted of the same offense.

" According to University of Richmond Law Review, " When offering an Alford plea, a defendant asserts his innocence but admits that sufficient evidence exists to convict him of the offense.

" A Guide to Military Criminal Law notes that under the Alford plea, " the defendant concedes that the prosecution has enough evidence to convict, but the defendant still refuses to admit guilt.

Defendants can take advantage of the ability to use the Alford guilty plea, by admitting there is enough evidence to convict them of a higher crime, while at the same time pleading guilty to a lesser charge.

When it became clear that the women's remains would never be found without Robinson's cooperation, a compromise of sorts was reached: In a carefully scripted plea in October, 2003, Robinson acknowledged only that Koster had enough evidence to convict him of capital murder for the deaths of Godfrey, Clampitt, Bonner, and the Faiths.

After initially pleading " not guilty " to all charges and being released on bail Osho, on the advice of his lawyers, entered an " Alford plea "— a type of guilty plea through which a suspect does not admit guilt, but does concede there is enough evidence to convict him — to one count of having a concealed intent to remain permanently in the U. S. at the time of his original visa application in 1981 and one count of having conspired to have sannyasins enter into sham marriages to acquire U. S. residency.

Prosecutors in Texas did not feel they had enough evidence to convict Watts of murder, so in 1982 they arranged a plea bargain.

Upon making the plea, the convict was entitled to be examined by a jury of matrons, generally selected from the observers present at the trial.

" Webster's New World Law Dictionary defines Alford plea as: " A guilty plea entered as part of a plea bargain by a criminal defendant who denies committing the crime or who does not actually admit his guilt.

Major Steven E. Walburn argues in a 1998 article in The Air Force Law Review that this form of guilty plea should be adopted for usage by the United States military.

* Plea bargaining comes into effect — India Law: A new chapter — Chapter XXI A — on ‘ plea bargaining ’ has been inserted in the Criminal Procedure Code ( 1973 )

Peine forte et dure ( Law French for " hard and forceful punishment ") was a method of torture formerly used in the common law legal system, in which a defendant who refused to plead (" stood mute ") would be subjected to having heavier and heavier stones placed upon his or her chest until a plea was entered, or as the weight of the stones on the chest became too great for the condemned to breathe, fatal suffocation would occur.

Professor Robert Chesney, of Wake Forest University Law School, said: It is certainly not uncommon for the government to expect a defendant to testify in the wake of a plea agreement.

Peine forte et dure ( Law French for " hard and forceful punishment ") was a method of torture formerly used in the common law legal system, in which a defendant who refused to plead (" stood mute ") would be subjected to having heavier and heavier stones placed upon his or her chest until a plea was entered, or as the weight of the stones on the chest became too great for the condemned to breathe, fatal suffocation would occur.

If his plea for castration and whipping as generally applicable methods of punishing criminals savors of the archaic ( Yale Law Journal, June 1899 ), he was capable also of starting nation-wide comment, as on the radically new ideas embodied in his " The Natural Right to a Natural Death " ( Journal of Social Science, 1889 ).

The Law Officers published two consultation papers, which led to guidelines encouraging plea negotiations between defence and prosecution and the enhancement of Crown Court powers to bar fraudsters, wind up companies and give compensation to a wider range of fraud victims.

His plea caused the Polish king Władysław Jagiełło issue a privilege chartering Chodzież on Magdeburg Law in 1434.

As Anne McGillivray, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Manitoba, explained the continuing public antagonism against Homolka: There was widespread belief that she had known where the videotapes were hidden, that she wilfully concealed the Jane Doe incidents and, most centrally, that her claims of being under Bernardo's control – a central tenet of the plea bargain – were dubious.

In 1682, before the general Assembly of the French Clergy, he preached a great sermon on the unity of the Church and made it a magnificent plea for compromise.

Specifically, the chiefs sought protection from the French, " the tribe of Marion ", and it is the first known plea for British intervention written by Māori.

The Roman de l ' énergie nationale trilogy makes a plea for local patriotism, militarism, the faith to one's roots and to one's family, and for the preservation of the distinctive qualities of the old French provinces.

Conversely, the guilty plea and plea bargaining were until recently unknown to French law, and now it only applies to crimes for which the maximum sentence is one year imprisonment.

She attracted worldwide media attention when she was convicted of manslaughter following a plea bargain in the 1991 and 1992 rape-murders of two Ontario teenage girls, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, as well as the rape and death of her own sister Tammy.

Printed in French, the document is the first plea in favour of a constitutional reform in Canada.

'' My impassioned plea for civil rights created a landslide of correspondence and one sponsor even asked me to consider replacing the Eddie Cantor comedy hour on a permanent basis.

A lawyer, hired by the college, was arguing specifically for Dartmouth: Daniel Webster, class of 1801, made her plight the dramatic focus of his whole plea.

The most important of these found him in agreement with Hough's plea for reform.

The Laos government plea for help was made by Foreign Minister Tiao Sopsaisana.

A plea of nolo contendere, followed by a nominal fine, after all is a small price to pay for this untrammeled license.

Today in common-law jurisdictions, the court enters a plea of not guilty for a defendant who refuses to enter a plea.

Allocution is sometimes required of a defendant who pleads guilty to a crime in a plea bargain in exchange for a reduced sentence.

On a trip to Washington, with a final plea for help in East Tennessee in early 1863, he gave a speech in Indianapolis, saying: " If the institution of slavery denies the government the right of agitation, and seeks to overthrow it, then the government has a clear right to destroy it.

Andocides ' plea for his return and removal of civil disabilities.

Following this ruling, Alford petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, which upheld the initial ruling, and subsequently to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit which ruled that Alford's plea was not voluntary, because it was made under fear of the death penalty.

The Supreme Court held that for the plea to be accepted, the defendant must have been advised by a competent lawyer who was able to inform the individual that his best decision in the case would be to enter a guilty plea.

" The Court allowed the guilty plea only with a simultaneous protestation of innocence as there was enough evidence to show that the prosecution had a strong case for a conviction, and the defendant was entering such a plea to avoid this possible sentencing.

The Court went on to note that even if the defendant could have shown that he would not have entered a guilty plea " but for " the rationale of receiving a lesser sentence, the plea itself would not have been ruled invalid.

Others hold that an Alford plea is simply one form of a guilty plea, and, as with other guilty pleas, the judge must see there is some factual basis for the plea.

" In the 1999 South Carolina Supreme Court case State v. Gaines, the Court held that Alford guilty pleas were to be held valid in the absence of a specific on-the-record ruling that the pleas were voluntary – provided that the sentencing judge acted appropriately in accordance with the rules for acceptance of a plea made voluntarily by the defendant.

In the 2006 case before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Ballard v. Burton, Judge Carl E. Stewart writing for the Court held that an Alford guilty plea is a " variation of an ordinary guilty plea ".