guilty plea
noun · Geständnis
A guilty plea has no true German counterpart. The English plea is dispositive, once entered the defendant stands convicted and no trial follows, and it fixes the sentence discount. A German Geständnis is only evidence the court must still weigh, § 261 StPO and § 244 II StPO, and it ends nothing on its own, the nearest procedural device is the Verständigung, § 257c StPO.
Which translation, when
Why
An English guilty plea is a procedural act that ends the case, entered, it removes the need for a trial, the defendant is convicted on the plea alone, and it drives the sentence, the guilty-plea reduction reaching up to a third. German procedure has no such act. Even a full Geständnis does not bind the court, which must still be convinced of guilt on the whole evidence, § 261 StPO gives it free Beweiswürdigung and § 244 II StPO obliges it to investigate the truth of its own motion. The one device that comes close is the Verständigung of § 257c StPO, introduced in 2009 and reined in by the Bundesverfassungsgericht in 2013, where the defendant confesses in exchange for a sentence ceiling, but the court may still depart from the agreement and the confession has to be checked against the file, not simply accepted, and bargaining over the charge itself is forbidden. So translating guilty plea as Geständnis turns a conviction-producing procedural act into a mere item of evidence, and loses that in England the plea is the verdict and sets the discount.
Typical mistakes
- A Geständnis does not end the case, the court must still establish guilt on the whole evidence, § 261 StPO and § 244 II StPO, so a guilty plea rendered as Geständnis loses that the English act is itself the conviction.
- The guilty-plea reduction has no fixed German mirror, mitigation for a confession runs through § 46 StGB and any Verständigung, not a set one-third, so promising a client the English discount is wrong.
- A Verständigung is not a plea bargain of the English or American kind, the court is not bound by it and charge-bargaining is excluded, § 257c II StPO, so equating the two overstates what the parties can agree.
What matters
A defendant deciding how to plead in an English case, the decision then explained to a German client: rendering guilty plea as Geständnis suggests a confession that settles nothing, when the English plea is the conviction itself and fixes the sentencing discount before any hearing on the facts.
What the machine misses
A guilty plea comes back as Geständnis almost every time, and the two are not the same act, the English plea ends the trial and is itself the conviction, while a German Geständnis is only evidence the court must still weigh under § 261 StPO and investigate under § 244 II StPO. A translated guilty plea therefore reads as a confession that changes nothing procedurally, hiding that the defendant has already been convicted and that the sentence discount is fixed to the plea.
Examples
| to plead guilty | sich schuldig bekennen |
| a guilty plea | ein Schuldbekenntnis |
| the guilty plea discount | der Strafnachlass für ein Geständnis |