Negotiation #4 People v. Malvenue

I was the district attorney in this negotiation! Mr. Malvenue was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon against my client, Mrs. Malevenue. Despite the fact that Mrs. Malvenue has refuesed to sign a complaint against her husband, she is still afraid of repeated behavior. As her attorney it is my duty to make sure he does is intimidated by a stricter sentence and or punishment.

Scott acting as Mr. Malvenue's defense attorney and I have begun our negotiation.

Scott asks if my client has signed the paper to press charges. I did not know which information he had and playing it safe, I said i could won't give that information.
I asked if Mr. Malevnue had pleaded guilty, that threw Scott off a bit, and he re-read and said "no". He said she "fell" from an accident and ended up with bruises.
Scott asked if it were ok to start plea bargaining to which we agreed quickly.
I asked for his suggestions.
Scott made it clear he didn't want his client to go to jail, and could we arrange for counseling and community time.
I knew I was going to have to play this cool and some how incorporate counseling and community time, but I wasn't letting him get off on prison, but not going too hard, because I was too swamped for another case. Scott was biting at the bait pretty good here and not putting up too much of a struggle for me.
I threw out that the law states that if a man abuses his wife, regardless of if she presses charges ( which I really don't know the laws-but was bluffing my way thru this) ...ect..
Scott getting nervous jumps in and reminds me that Mrs. Malvenue did not press charges , so therefore; he won't go to jail...ect..she wants him back and loves him.
I reminded him that not only was Mrs. Malvenue jeapordized, but her son was at a high risk and the judge would be in favor of Mr. Malvenue spending much more time in prison.
Scott persists and tells me that if it does go to jail the only evidence of a witness was a neighbor.
I agreed to that statement, but alerted Scott that when Mrs. Malvenue goes for her own counseling she will probably leave her husband anyhow, after realizing he is scum, and she won't let her husband see her or the kids...
I asked how much time did he think was unreasonable or what time limit was he thinking about it as far as prison time. No more than 2 years with community time and counseling, it would need to be a short sentence.( wow! 2 years...i was doing good with this negotiation, at this point and knew I could get a shorter one and get this over with very quickly). I counter-offered with 1 year and 3 months, plus 1 year of community counseling, with community work involved.
We made our agreement rather quickly and pleasantly enough I did not go to court and was happy that Mr. Malvenue was going to be involved in counseling. I was happy at that outcome.

My negotiations have gone very quickly and I think I learned from the others and applied some of what I learned to this negotiation. I waited, listened and didn't jump at the first offer or put my offer out there. I wanted to gather some information first to collect as much valuable facts to build my case upon. It seemed that Scott was doing the much of the same strategy as me, not giving too much information, and perhaps giving too little for fear of losing what we needed to gain in the negotiation as well.

In retrospect, since I am learning to negotiate, I think I asked the right questions to gather my information, but still very vague as to what kind of creative questions will get me the right answer. I would like to build upon that.