Defendant’s free will in legal collaboration and its relation with pre-trial detention

Abstract

The legal collaboration, a type of evidence used on organized crime prosecutions, demands free will of the defendant. Appraising the defendant’s free will, many critics cover the deals made with an arrested defendant during the negotiation of the legal collaboration. These two institutes — legal collaboration and pre-trial detention —, although they do not present themselves as a cause-effect relation, commonly are approached in practice as associated. This essay intends to evaluate the defendant’s free will during pre-trial detention and the legal collaboration’s bargaining. It asserts a strict and clear relation between pre-trial detention and the legal collaboration bargaining. Identifying occasional problems do not imply the conclusion on the existence of a structural problem to legal collaboration institute. This consideration is relevant to avoid superficial solutions that could fragilize even more the held defendant. Methodologically, from a literature review and document analysis about the subject, the paper clarifies what is a “criminal case” and what it means to the study.