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If you're going to court for any criminal charge, you plead not guilty. The DA is going to have laid the strongest charges they believe they can get a conviction on, but there is always risk in going to trial. The prosecution generally cares a lot more about getting a conviction than what charge that conviction is on, or what penalty that conviction carries.
So. You're caught dead to rights, charged with a crime. If you plead guilty, you are also waiving your right to trial, and taking whatever conviction and (probably) penalty the prosecution advises the judge.
On the other hand, if you plead not guilty, now you have the opportunity to accept a plea deal from the prosecution - changing your plea to guilty - which would include what charge and what penalty. Depending on what you've done, this can save you a lot of money, reduce or eliminate probation or incarceration time, or take the death penalty off the table.
You can always change your plea from not guilty to guilty. You can't do that the other way around. Whenever you see headlines about "So-and-so pleads not guilty," that doesn't (in most cases) mean they intend to beat the charge. It's just what you do.
Another huge, important, but subtle distinction to make here is that the trial is not to decide whether you did the thing. It's not always a mystery who perpetrated an alleged crime. Even if you pull out a gun and shoot somebody on the 50-yard-line at the Super Bowl, and 300 million people see it, they can't just take you off to prison for murder. They have to give you a trial to determine whether you violated the law.
There's a thing called an affirmative defense, as in, "yes, I did the thing, but it wasn't a crime, because..." If you can, say, convince a jury that you're a time traveler, the ref was going to make a bad call in the 4th quarter that cost your team the Super Bowl win, and that justified shooting him, well, then it wasn't a crime. That's what a jury is ultimately charged with deciding.
This is not to say that Magione's attorney plans to present an affirmative defense, just that there are a number of good reasons to plead not guilty, even if it's 100% certain you did the thing.
(Edit: Typo.)
Judicial system working like this (including the previous comments about pleas) is something I would've probably doubted if I read it in a fiction, but here we are
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