Introduction

Guilty Pleas and Trial Rights

Introduction

When a defendant answers guilty at arraignment, the court has received no evidence to weigh and has set no trial for later. In Boykin v. Alabama the Supreme Court treated a guilty plea as a conviction in itself, so that once the court accepts it nothing remains but to enter judgment and fix punishment.¹ No jury hears the case, no accuser is cross-examined, and the prosecution is never asked to prove anything. A single word therefore surrenders the whole bundle of trial rights. The Sixth Amendment lists most of them: a speedy and public trial before an impartial jury, notice of the nature and cause of the accusation, confrontation of the witnesses against the accused, compulsory process for obtaining favorable witnesses, and the assistance of counsel.² The privilege against self-incrimination, which the Fifth Amendment supplies, is given up in the same moment.

A surrender this large is valid only if the defendant makes it knowingly, voluntarily, and intelligently, meaning that the defendant understood what was being given up and chose to give it up free of compulsion. In state prosecutions the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which forbids a State to deprive any person of liberty without due process of law, is the route by which these protections bind the court.³ Boykin then answered the next question, which is how anyone later learns whether the defendant really understood. The Court held that it was plain error for a trial judge to accept a guilty plea without an affirmative showing on the record that the plea was intelligent and voluntary, so a silent record cannot support a presumed waiver.⁴ The reason is practical. A judge who questions the defendant at the time leaves a record adequate for any later review, and that record forestalls collateral proceedings that would otherwise have to probe murky memories years afterward.⁵

This chapter moves between two layers of law. The first is the constitutional floor that Boykin and the decisions after it establish. The second is the set of Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, chiefly Rules 10, 11, 20, and 43, that turn that floor into steps a judge must carry out. The lesson follows the life of a plea in order: the arraignment where a plea is first requested, the kinds of pleas the defendant may enter, the constitutional test for their validity, the Rule 11 colloquy that implements the test, plea agreements, the defendant's presence, transfer under Rule 20 for plea and sentence, and finally withdrawal and finality. It begins at the arraignment, the moment the court first asks the defendant how to plead.