#Colloquy legal definition how to
#Colloquy legal definition full

#Colloquy legal definition full

But anyone who spends time in court knows (or should know, and I’m talking here to trial and appellate judges) that defendants often don’t have full command of the details of their waiver of rights or the meaning of their plea. Ostensibly, this paperwork protects you by providing written, explicit warnings about what rights you are waiving. So the paperwork you sign creates a series of locks, each of which ensures that you (1) have waived all rights associated with going to trial, (2) know what the plea deal is and (3) knowingly and voluntarily want to forgo trial and take the deal. All that talk about your right to a jury trial is great, but, trust me, the system desperately needs you to take a plea.Īnd when you do take a plea, the system has a vested interest in protecting it. If everyone, or if even one in ten people, demanded a jury trial, the wheels would come off the system. The criminal justice system only works if upwards of 96 or 97 percent of the charged and indicted cases plead out. The first thing you need to know is that all the paperwork you signed isn’t really designed to protect you, it’s designed to protect the plea and the judgment.

#Colloquy legal definition how to

In a three-part series, I’m going to describe how the guilty plea is protected by the Criminal Justice System, how a plea bargain is immortalized into a judgment, how a plea open to the court works (and how defendants sometimes get screwed with this procedural arrangement), and how to challenge guilty pleas as involuntary. If you’re regretting entering a guilty plea and want to fight it, ring up a good criminal appeal attorney, because, as you’ll see below, the strategy you need to fight it depends on the procedural details of the case and at what point in the process you realized you’d been crossed, mislead, or misadvised. Defendants often fail to understand the legal significance of what they’ve signed. Trying to undo a guilty plea is never easy.

It takes awhile for the defendant to realize what has happened. This is because involuntary pleas are almost always based on a misunderstanding, misrepresentation, or ineffective assistance on the part of plea counsel. Defendants usually don’t realize their guilty plea was involuntary at the time they enter it.