What's the definition of "Charge-Stacking"?
Charge Stacking, v., Made possible by the legislature’s obsession with creating overlapping, largely duplicative criminal statutes, charge-stacking is the prosecutorial practice of charging a defendant with multiple counts for a single incident or even a single act. This practice gives the prosecutor the necessary leverage to coerce a guilty plea in exchange for the dismissal of some duplicative charges, thereby ensuring a conviction without having to do any actual work. [Footnotes and quotation marks omitted.]
For more highly-entertaining, excessively footnoted dictionary entries, check out my newest article, The Devil's Dictionary of Criminal Procedure, recently published in the Denver Law Review Forum. You can find the article on Denver Law Review website, here, or on the articles page of my own website, here.
Enjoy!
