And it was this conflict that appeared in the government's recent case against an anesthesiologist. The government has developed a way to pursue settlement discussions with criminal defendants without violating their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves. The technique is a limited use immunity agreement . In many, professional areas, participants deal with complex and complicated problems and develop their own language to describe the issues and problems that they see. Sometimes complex but otherwise routine problems are given catchy names in the slang that take hold in the profession.
Law is no different.
It is a contract between the government and the criminal defendant in which the defendant agrees to provide information in exchange for the government's promise that statements made as part of the process will not be used against the defendant. The understanding was that the government prosecutor would not use information learned in settlement discussions in an inappropriate way. The anesthesiologist and her attorneys were handed a queen for a day agreement, but they had not seen it before. There were 2 exceptions to the government's inability to use the anesthesiologist's statements. The first was that the government reserved the right to use the defendant's statements for the purpose of obtaining leads to other evidence and second, and most important, the government retained the right to rebut evidence or arguments offered by or on behalf of the defendant.