Gun crime plea deals common in Del.

Mike Chalmers of The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal analyzed 115,000 felony cases overseen by Attorney General M. Jane Brady during her 11-year tenure, to show that plea deals involving gun crimes are common in Delaware. The newspaper found that "of the nearly 16,000 weapons-related cases filed from 1994 through 2004 — years Brady served as the state's top prosecutor — three-quarters ended without a felony-level weapons conviction. ... A third of the 16,000 cases ended with a conviction on another felony. " To examine how Brady's office handled felony cases, The News Journal reviewed computerized records, obtained after a six-year legal battle from the Delaware Criminal Justice Information System, or DelJIS, which tracks criminal cases from arrest through prosecution and punishment. Of the nearly 9,000 cases involving the charge of possession of a deadly weapon, only 6 percent ended with a conviction on that charge.