I just have to say that I hate when I see the word "pleaded" in relation to any legal or crime article. It just sounds so wrong. I was actually watching "Facing Evil With Candice Delong" and during the show they put on a clip of a newspaper article that had to with the case being talked about and it mentioned that both criminals "pleaded" guilty instead of taking the risk of going to trial, which didn't sound right to me, so I looked it up to see if it was even grammatically correct and that brought me here. I don't really mind the media using certain grammar or going with certain words because it's what everyone else is doing basically because I just don't really care and I'm not even really a grammar stickler myself because let's be honest, I'm sure I've probably made a bunch of grammatical errors in this very comment (lol). But why on earth would anyone use that over "pled" because it's what other media outlets are doing?! I don't care how popular the word is, it sounds AWFUL, using "pled" in a sentence as opposed to "pleaded" is just so much more pleasing to the ear. Just needed to throw that out there because even as non-caring I am about perfect grammar, there are some words that when used incorrectly or just sound bad, that make my skin crawl for some reason, and that's definitely one of em. :)