I agree with our original poster, Stan, that "pleaded" is sub-standard English. It grates on my nerves every time I hear it, and since my major television channels all come out of Youngstown, Ohio--a city known for its high crime rate--I get to hear "the defendent 'pleaded' not guilty" several times every day. I think this comes in part from the abandonment of the King James Version of the Bible in most churches. I'm 60 now, so when I was young, the KJV was all we had, and it was roundly praised as a model of elegant English, even if it was archaic in some of its phrasing, and took some work to understand. As we struggled with the older form, we learned elegance. Now, even our scriptures are written on a newspaper level, and we suffer for that. Even the "word of God" now sounds like something written by a journalistic hack.

I have no problem with using modern Bible versions, but I do miss the elegance that used to grace the written word. Go back and read "Gone With The Wind," "The Song of Bernadette," or "The Lord of the Rings," and you'll find vastly different usage. Sometimes it can be over-wordy, but if you keep at it, you'll be struck by the beauty. We're losing that, and "pleaded" is just one more example of how far our language has fallen.