Is There a Real Factual Support Behind the Guilty Plea During the Criminal Trials - The Macedonian Experiences

• In Event: Prosecutorial Decision-making and Alternatives to trial 1. Opportunity and Negotiated Justice Across Jurisdictions

Abstract

The Law on Criminal Procedure in Republic of North Macedonia, enacted in 2010, consists several adversarial trial’s instruments, which main task was supposed to be improvement of the efficiency of the Macedonian criminal trials and acceleration of the criminal procedure. However, after a certain period we are witnessing decline of the number of cases resolved through such adversarial instruments for speedy trial, and in particular decline of the number of cases where defendants are pleading guilty at courts. Some of the reasons for such decline of these cases which are resolved with defendant’s guilty plea can be based upon the improper implementation of the law, or due to legal imperfections together with the lesser sanctioning policy and absence of proper instrument for providing of the expected sentence as an outcome from the bargaining procedure. However, in practice the author has detected an additional problematic area located within the factual support of the guilty plea during the main hearing. Hence, in practice it was observed that the courts often do not analyze sufficient evidence as factual support to the defendants’ guilty plea. However, in this context the real question that is raised in such cases is what is sufficient evidence in regard to factual support of the guilty plea, and how high is the level of persuasion of the courts while determining whether to accept or to decline the offered defendant’s guilty plea. Hence, author concludes that there is a gap between the theoretical definitions of the guilty plea and its practical implementation, and provides practical proposals for improvement of the provisions of the Law on Criminal Procedure.

Author

• Boban Misoski, Misoski, Faculty of Law "Iustinianus Primus" Skopje