A common plea agreement that Denver criminal defense lawyers can negotiate for their clients is a deferred judgment. This is somewhat confusing for a lot of defendants. What in the world is it? Basically this is a situation a defendant pleads guilty on the condition that he will not actually be sentenced for the crime. The court takes the guilty plea in open court on the record, but does not make the judgment final or "enter" the judgment. The judge also does not sentence the defendant. Instead, the judgment and sentencing are deferred for a certain period of time. At that point, if certain conditions are met, the case can be dismissed.
Functionally, this whole thing appears a lot like probation. The conditions involve things like community service, and not committing additional crimes for a stated period, a year or six months. Your Denver criminal defense lawyer can advise as to the actual consequences. In any case, even though it resembles a probationary sentence, if the conditions are fulfilled the case can be dismissed, unlike in the case of a probationary case where it is actually a conviction.
Because the conviction is never finalized and because there is technically no sentence, sometimes these cases are eligible for record sealing. Again, your Denver criminal defense lawyer can advise you on the possibility of this. However this is not an option in every case, so you should learn about it before you plead guilty and accept the deferred judgment. Although a conviction will not show up on your record, the police records and charges will. For some people this will be problematic, and record sealing can help with that. For others it will be no big deal.
In any case, the big things with deferred judgments are to know and follow the conditions of the judgment, and also know the exact consequences of your deferred judgments. Because like with just about everything else, every deferred judgment case is different.
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