most of the time a judge will go with the DA. they have to work together in many cases and they do not like to step on each other's toes. depending on how much time you have left (until jury) you may get another plea. if you are a week away....fire your lawyer and get a new one. this may help in making the DA to offer more plea agreements or it might piss him/her off. it all depends on how backed up your court system is.

We have to accept the plea by August 20th or they take back the offer. The trial date is set for September 11. Our attorney is actually someone my husband knows personally from his military service, and we've been told he's one of the best attorneys to have for something like this. We will be calling our attorney tomorrow and I'm hoping and praying there is room to negotiate or something. I can't believe it's this or nothing. This plea offer came about just a little over a week into our attorney and the prosecutor discussing it, do they usually come about that quickly?

Deal I took was a month in county 3 year probation includling all the bs that comes,with it and 10 year,reg

My H's judge went by the presentence report versus he prosecution recommendation. The plea was that he had to be sentenced to at least 10 years probation (in AZ the standard for sex crimes is lifetime). The prosecution still recommended lifetime but the judge didn't do life for him, thank goodness.

One thing I forgot to mention is part of the plea agreement would include my husband asking for no less then 5 years prison sentence. I have never heard of you actually having to offer up what you feel you should get sentenced, is this normally done? So, basically they are trying to force a minimum of 5 years sentence even though they are removing the receipt charge. Plus, in order for the prosecution to even accept the deal is if my husband has a polygraph done to verify he has never touched a child. Is that also usually done before a plea deal is reached? They said we can have say in who does the polygraph, but the prosecution will have entire say on the questions asked.

In my guy's case, the prosecution recommended 20 years in prison. He got 4 years with 15 years supervision. So, they don't always go with what the prosecution asks for.

Guessing here that you are talking federal situation with the amount of time you are talking about. The hard part is already done, they agreed to drop the receipt charge. You are lucky they will be just charging possession. Most judges these days are not handing out sentences for the full amount of time. With the good atty you have I would guess that he will get 5 years.
If this is federal get your atty to ask them not to do a press release. Because if they do, the world will be able to google your husband's legal information.
My 21 year old son got 9 years for possession and distributing (from using a p2p file sharing). He got 30 years of supervise release and will have to spend 25 years on the registry (for the file sharing) instead of 10 for mere possession. Our atty got no press release.
Good luck! Faithflower

Yes they should allow you to do the poly before a plea is offered, might do a full evaluation as well (MSI, psychosexual history, all the SO testing...) and this will be given to the presentence folks. In this report, they will outline any aggravating or mitigating factors, which the judge will use to determine the sentence. So even though the prosecutor may recommend one thing, it's not always certain whether things go for or against you. You basically gotta hope for the best but expect the worst.

My husband took the plea today. He will be taking a polygraph next week. The poly was part of the plea, the prosecutor insisted it be done to prove there was no contact with a child, which there wasn't. The plea is withdrawn if it comes back that there was contact with a child, there wasn't, but that is the reason why the prosecution has asked for it. My husband also had a full psych eval done last March.

Faith- can an attorney really ask that there be no press release? We had asked our attorney about this last spring already and he said he had no control over that.

I forgot to add, yes, this is federal.

The Atty. does not have control on that, it falls under the Freedom of Information Act.