HOWEVER, the judge can do whatever he/she wants within the parameters of the charge. The judge can ignore the plea deal altogether after listening to Kayla reading Nick's words and crying theater girl tears begging for a harsher sentence.
This may vary by jurisdiction, but in Minnesota the insane fantasy that a certain
non-practicing former never-lawyer has been trying to sell to diddlerverse dunces about some judge's alleged ability to "throw out" the plea deal is not quite so simple, and instead Aaron does have
some flexibility about how to deal with any unwelcome surprises that might arise on Wednesday:
State v. King, No. A14-0944 (Minn. App. January 26, 2015)
Some amendments have altered the rule citation mentioned there, but the substance is essentially the same to this very day:
Minn. R. Crim. P. 15.04, subd. 3(2)
In this particular case, we unfortunately don't have the plea hearing's transcript that was far too Nickless to pay ~$180 for unlike the sentencing hearing, so there's no way to know what was said about what parts were set in stone or were postponed, but just reading the tea leaves here without a transcript, it's fair to assume that the plea petition was critically in the nature of an "agreement" rather than a mere "recommendation," and it's only slightly less fair to assume that the wait for a pre-sentence investigation implies that there was a postponement of full acceptance of the plea deal until sentencing and it therefore can be easily withdrawn:
[L]
State v. DeZeler, 422 N.W.2d 32, 36 (Minn. App. 1988 ), affirmed on other grounds, 427 N.W.2d 231 (Minn. 1988 )
As for the odds of whether such a surprise plea withdrawal could end up becoming necessary, well, just take a gander at this judge and make your own independent judgments:
[L]
TLDR:
Even if Kayla's ample community theater experience produces enough crocodile tears to fool the judge into throwing the plea agreement out the window and railroading Aaron into an executed jail sentence that nobody on
either side of the versus saw coming, that would still leave Aaron the "out" of withdrawing the plea as a matter of right, excluding from a jury's view his testimonial admissions of guilt that he spewed out in direct reliance on the plea agreement, and shoving Geanu's unwillingness to appear straight down the state's fucking throat to get the dismissal, directed verdict, or outright acquittal that were always in the cards. It kinda sucks that direct reliance on the plea agreement induced his spewing out all sorts of non-testimonal admissions of guilt in public that would be tougher (if not impossible) to exclude from a jury's view, and that's on him (and/or on his lawyer for not advising him to shut the fucking fuck up until
after the proverbial fat lady sings), but if the judge is truly going to railroad him on post-plea sentencing, then there would be nothing to lose in shoving it all through a trial that'd probably end up with a roughly similar sentence anyway. Far more importantly, such a post-plea-withdrawal trial would be worth it
for the content.