Introduction

Rule 20 Plea Transfers

Introduction

A federal criminal case ordinarily belongs in the district where the crime was committed, and a defendant has a right to be tried there.¹ That default produces an awkward result when a person charged in one district is arrested in another, perhaps at home in a different state long after the alleged offense, and wants to plead guilty. Under ordinary venue principles the defendant would be sent back to the charging district only to enter a plea and be sentenced, even though no trial will occur. The journey costs the defendant time and hardship, and it costs the government the expense of transporting the defendant with escorts. Once the defendant is willing to plead guilty, the reasons for keeping the case at the scene of the crime lose most of their force, because no local jury will be called to decide anything.

Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 20 answers this problem by moving the file to the defendant while the defendant stays put.² Rule 20(a) provides that a prosecution may be transferred from the district where the indictment or information is pending, or from which a warrant on a complaint has been issued, to the district where the defendant is arrested, held, or present, if the rule's conditions are met.³ Those conditions make the transfer consensual. The defendant must opt in by stating a wish to plead guilty or nolo contendere (a plea of no contest, which accepts conviction without admitting guilt), and the United States attorneys in both districts must agree to the move.⁴ The benefits run in both directions: the defendant gets a speedy disposition without the hardship of being returned to the charging district, and the government is spared the cost of the trip.⁵ Where the defendant faces several pending charges, a single judge can also take the plea and impose sentence with the whole picture in view, which makes a package resolution of all the charges possible.⁶

Because Rule 20 is an exception to the default place of prosecution, its conditions are the heart of the lesson, and the question that matters most is who must approve in writing. This chapter first fixes the geography of the rule, meaning which district is the charging district, which is the receiving district, and which way the case travels. It then takes up the defendant's written statement, the approvals of the two prosecutors, and what the clerk does once those papers are in hand. The first step on any problem is to identify the two districts correctly, so the first section begins there.