What Is an Alford Plea?
By entering an Alford plea, a defendant can accept a plea bargain while maintaining their factual innocence. Legally, however, it’s the same as pleading guilty and results in a criminal conviction.
“An Alford plea has the same functional effect as a traditional guilty plea,” Steven Waterkotte, a criminal defense attorney in Missouri, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “When someone enters an Alford plea, they are still pleading guilty, but they are not admitting that they committed the crime. Instead, they are acknowledging that the prosecution has sufficient evidence to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.”
The Alford plea gets its name from Henry Alford, who was charged with fatally shooting a North Carolina man named Nathaniel Young in 1963. Alford already had a lengthy criminal history, including a prior murder conviction, and all of the evidence suggested he was the one who shot Young. Believing a jury would likely convict Alford, his attorney recommended he plead guilty to a lesser charge to avoid the death penalty. Alford agreed, but while pleading guilty in court, he maintained his innocence. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Alford later challenged the sentence, arguing that his guilty plea was not voluntary because he was afraid of being sentenced to death. After some legal back and forth, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in 1970 that a defendant could voluntarily take a plea bargain while maintaining their innocence, even if he was motivated by avoiding the death penalty.
However, states and individual judges still get to decide whether to accept or reject Alford pleas. State courts in New Jersey, Indiana and Michigan do not allow defendants to submit Alford pleas. In other states, judges decide whether to accept them on a case by case basis, just as they do for all plea deals.
“It is up to the discretion of the prosecutor and, ultimately, the judge, whether a defendant can plead guilty to a crime and forgo trial,” Thea Johnson, a law professor and associate dean at Rutgers University, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. ”The Supreme Court has blessed Alford pleas as legitimate, but that does not mean that every judge in the country will accept an Alford plea. Many judges will not allow a defendant to claim innocence while pleading guilty and will insist instead that if a defendant wants to plead guilty, then they admit to being guilty.”
Why Would Someone Enter an Alford Plea?
A defendant might enter an Alford plea because they are genuinely innocent but worried about the outcome of a trial, Johnson says. If a defendant is facing a long mandatory prison sentence, they might decide it makes more sense to plead guilty in exchange for a more lenient punishment. “There is no guaranteed outcome at a trial, even for an innocent defendant,” Johnson says. “Sometimes innocent people are convicted at trial.”
In other cases, the defendant might simply believe the prosecutor has enough evidence to secure a conviction at trial. For example, even though his first trial resulted in a hung jury, Abaroa was aware that 11 jurors had voted to convict him. To Abaroa and his legal team, that outcome might have indicated he was likely to be convicted at the second trial.
And sometimes, an Alford plea serves as “a way for prosecutors to save face,” Johnson says. She points to the case of West Memphis Three as an example. In 1994, three teenagers—Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr.—were convicted of murdering three young boys in West Memphis, Ark., despite their claims of innocence.
Later, mounting evidence suggested the defendants were, in fact, innocent. Prosecutors worried the men might be granted new trials, which they were likely to win. To avoid this possibility, prosecutors offered a post-conviction Alford plea deal, Johnson says. They pleaded guilty while maintaining their innocence and were released from prison in 2011.
Johnson says there are “serious ethical questions” about the use of an Alford plea in this situation. “If indeed the prosecutors believed these men had killed three young children, why did they let them take an Alford plea and walk out of prison?” she adds. “And if they didn’t believe the men were guilty, then why force them to plead guilty to a crime they didn’t commit? Alford pleas are hard to square with the view that the criminal justice system should be pursuing outcomes that are both just and accurate.”
The Benefits of an Alford Plea
As with other types of plea bargains, an Alford plea allows all parties to forgo the stress and expense of a trial. Family members and witnesses don’t have to testify, lawyers don’t have to spend hours preparing and defendants don’t have to worry about potentially embarrassing information coming out at trial, Jo Potuto, a law professor at the University of Nebraska, tells A&E Crime + Investigation.
For prosecutors, a major benefit of negotiating a plea deal, including one involving an Alford plea, is that it guarantees a conviction. “Even when the evidence is compelling, there is still a risk a jury might acquit or hang, necessitating a retrial,” Potuto says. “In addition, a conviction can be reversed on appeal, where the appellate court limits some of the evidence used in the first trial. A prosecutor might believe the case is still winnable, but more difficult.”
Since the defendant is not admitting to committing the crime, an Alford plea might, in theory, help them maintain their standing in the community or among family and friends, she adds.
The Drawbacks of an Alford Plea
However, in reality, entering an Alford plea might not do much for a defendant’s reputation, Potuto says. Onlookers might not understand, nor care, that the defendant is maintaining his innocence since, legally speaking, an Alford plea is still a guilty plea, she adds.
Entering an Alford plea also makes an appeal more difficult, per Potuto. “The issues a defendant could raise would relate to the validity of the plea—in other words, that he was incompetent at the time or that the plea was made under duress,” she says. “This is an extremely high bar for a defendant to meet.”
Many defendants believe they are more likely to receive a lesser sentence with an Alford plea. In some cases, that’s true. But, in others, this strategy might backfire, James R. Snell Jr., a criminal defense lawyer in South Carolina, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “There are situations where the sentence may be more severe,” he says. “This is because a defendant pleading under Alford may not receive the benefit of accepting responsibility or [expressing] remorse in the eyes of the prosecutor or judge.”
This failure to acknowledge guilt may also come back to bite the defendant later, Snell says. For example, not expressing remorse might hurt a defendant’s chances of being released on parole.
For victims, Alford pleas can be especially frustrating. They do not have to endure a trial or a possible appeal. However, many see an Alford plea as a “hollow victory,” since the defendant never has to take responsibility for his actions, Potuto says. They may never feel a true sense of closure as a result.
“They do not get the satisfaction of a jury verdict that the defendant committed the crime,” she says. “They also have to endure the possibility that a defendant can continue to maintain his innocence and even do media interviews or write about his innocence.”
