I don't see anywhere in the story that the guilty plea was part of a plea bargain, but I would be very much surprised if it was not.  A plea bargain means that he was charged with a laundry list of crimes that would have kept him in jail pretty much his whole life and then offered a chance to plead "guilty" to a lessor crime.  We should always be told what they were originally charged with and what they pleaded down to.  The plea bargain system makes a mockery of the term guilty because an innocent person would have to be crazy to risk life imprisonment to prove a point.  The power of the DA's controlling charges and deals is pretty much absolute.