Deferred Prosecution Agreements

Abstract

This chapter examines how Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPA) schemes support or subvert conviction-based paradigms of criminal justice, and how instruments like the DPA are changing the role of prosecution agencies within the system. The DPA joins a crowded field of innovative regulatory tools: civil penalties, enforceable undertakings, as well as non-conviction freezing and confiscation orders are now available to combat with a wide range of criminality, both individual and corporate. The chapter examines how the DPA, though novel in form, is part of a much longer trajectory of hybrid justice, one which melds a range of purposes and functions, deterrent, punitive, incapacitative, preventive, restorative and restitutionary. It explores how negotiating justice using new hybrids, such as DPAs, poses new challenges for those prosecutors and regulators dealing with corporate crime and misconduct. The chapter shows that legal hybrids have been normalised in many modern legal systems.