Professor Jeffrey Fisher weighs in on how the use of plea bargains can affect criminal proceedings for The New York Times.

The West Virginia Supreme Court said Tuesday that a man could withdraw a guilty plea he made in 2002 for a robbery and rape because prosecutors had withheld DNA testing results suggesting that he was probably innocent.

The case will reverberate more widely, legal experts said, because the West Virginia justices have provided the clearest decision yet on what has been an ambiguous, but important, question about the constitutional rights of criminal defendants.

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The issue is immensely important, noted Jeffrey L. Fisher, a professor of criminal and constitutional law at the Stanford Law School, because well over 90 percent of criminal cases are resolved with plea bargains, not at trial.

The application of the Brady disclosure rule to plea bargaining is a “significant recognition of the realities of modern criminal procedure,” Mr. Fisher said.