Abstract
“DPAs [(Deferred Prosecution Agreements)] have had a truly transformative effect on particular companies and, more generally, on corporate culture across the globe,” declared Lanny Breuer, the head of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on September 13, 2012.2 Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) and non-prosecution agreements (NPAs) are settlement agreements between a prosecutor and a defendant in which the prosecutor agrees to either defer or forego prosecution in return for the defendant’s cooperation in an ongoing investigation or prosecution, as well as an agreement to comply with the requirements of the settlement. Rather than forcing prosecutors to face the “stark choice” of using the “sledgehammer” of criminal indictment or declining prosecution outright and simply “walking away,” DPAs and NPAs provide a middle road where a corporation can avoid prosecution in return “for an admission of wrongdoing, cooperation with the government’s investigation, . . . payment of monetary penalties, and concrete steps to improve the company’s behavior.” As these agreements have become “a mainstay of white collar criminal law enforcement” over the last ten years, prosecutors now view DPAs and NPAs as having “the same punitive, deterrent, and rehabilitative effect as a guilty plea.”
Recommended Citation
Daniel T. Hubbell, Judge Rakoff v. The Securities and Exchange Commission: Are "Neither Admit Nor Deny" Settlement Agreements in Securities Cases in the Public Interest?, 15 Tenn. J. Bus. L. 373 (2014) ,https://ir.law.utk.edu/transactions/vol15/iss2/6