"73. In many cases, the decision not to indict a person for the commission of certain offenses is made in the framework of a plea bargain with a suspect or defendant.... When the possibility of reaching a plea bargain is on the agenda, the prosecution is required to act in the best way possible to promote the purposes of the criminal law and to stand up for its values, in accordance with their substantive and professional judgment. This, taking into account the circumstances of the concrete case and taking into account the broader implications that the decision may have...
- The decision-making process on the way to signing a plea bargain requires a balancing act between complex considerations, and the court will not be inclined to intervene in this work of the prosecution. Many times the rule has been clarified, according to which interference in the prosecution's discretion with regard to reaching a plea bargain is reserved only for rare cases. .... This court will intervene in the discretion of the investigating and prosecution authorities in matters of criminal investigation and prosecution, including the decision to conduct a plea bargain with a defendant, in a limited manner. Although these matters are not immune to judicial review, it is customary to say that intervention in them will be reserved for the rare cases in which it is proven that the decision being examined suffers from extreme unreasonableness or material distortion."
(My emphasis – M.A.C.).
The Honorable Justice Uri Shoham added (at paragraph 91):
"91. In view of the difficulties that have been described, we are not comfortable with the agreement that was reached, and as stated, it is doubtful whether the outcome of the agreement is the optimal result, in terms of the public interest. Despite this criticism of the agreement, it is still necessary to decide whether it is an agreement tainted by extreme unreasonableness, or whether it is an agreement that was reached through the application of extraneous and irrelevant considerations. This question must be answered in the negative. At the end of the day, it appears that the respondents acted within the framework of their substantive and professional judgment, in order to achieve proper purposes, and the Movement for Quality Government's argument that the respondents considered considerations that were not relevant was not based on a sufficient factual basis, and should be rejected at this time. The choice of the respondents to follow the path they chose, out of a number of courses of action that were open to them, is a reasonable choice in the circumstances of the case. In this context, mention should be made of the conditions of uncertainty that surrounded the circumstances of the decision, and therefore it cannot be said that the course of action chosen is so unreasonable that it should be regarded as null and void. Despite the difficulties detailed above, and the feeling that it was possible to reach a better agreement that best serves the public interest, the bottom line is that we should look at what is in the agreement. In addition, weight must be given to the fact that the agreement serves the public interest that finds its expression, both in the prosecution of Rabbi Pinto and in the exhaustion of the examination in Arbiv's case, and it is clear that the respondents' decisions are not suffering from extreme unreasonableness or material distortion, in a manner that establishes grounds for our intervention."