Therefore, at this stage, increasing the amount of the fine will not contribute to deterring the public, but rather to compliance programs and the implementation of control procedures. Corporate rehabilitation also serves a deterrent purpose, since internal control and enforcement procedures in the corporation will, in general, be more effective in detecting deviations from the norm (even those that do not reach the level of a criminal offense), so that the corporation's employees will also be deterred from committing offenses.
Interim Summary – Sentencing
At this stage, the court must sentence the defendant, and if it were not a plea bargain, I would have set the defendants' sentence at a total fine of NIS 1.5 million, in the upper part of the punishment range, in light of the severity of the acts committed by the defendants, their duration and the involvement of the most senior officers, along with many discrepancies in the commission of the offenses. However, as noted, before a plea bargain in which the parties specified the punishment that the court is asked to impose on the defendants, which is a fine of 100,000 shekels. In light of the aforementioned gap, I will proceed to discuss, before sentencing, plea bargains in the corporate context in general, and the plea bargain before me in particular.
- Plea bargains
After I have discussed the penalty area, the plea bargain must be discussed. Today, most criminal cases in all instances end in plea bargains (see, in this regard: Oren Gezel Eyal and Avshalom Tor, "The Effect of Innocence on Plea Bargains: Empirical Findings, Psychological Insights, and Normative Implications," Mishpatim 39 115, 116 (1999); Oren Gazal-Eyal, "Sentencing Arrangements – A Proposal for a New Proceeding," Iyunei Mishpat 30 (2006); Dina Zadok, "Regulating the Use of Plea Bargains in Criminal Law – A Comparative Review," Knesset Research and Information Center (2010); Eliyahu Matza, "Plea Bargains – Past and Future," The Defense Attorney, 171, 174-175 (2011); Oren Gezel-Eyal and Keren Weinschel-Magal, "The Power of the Prosecution in Criminal Proceedings – An Empirical Study," Mishpatim 44, 835 (2014); Michal Tamir and Yoni Livni, "A Plea Bargain Is a Plea Bargain: Past, Present, Future," Laws 6, 49 (2014, hereinafter: Tamir and Livni, Plea Bargain); Mann, Criminal-Administrative Procedure, Reference 3 and the references therein)). This figure also appears in other legal systems (see a recent report dealing with plea bargains or other arrangements for waiving the criminal proceeding). The report examines various types of arrangements in which there is an agreement on punishment or waiver of law, in more than 90 countries, and shows that since the 1990s, the use of such arrangements has increased by about 300% and that this is a global trend: The Disappearing Trial, Towards a right-based approach to trial waiver systems (April 2017)).