By Grady Bridges,  J.J. Prescott

This report investigates and estimates racial disparities in prosecutorial decision-making in the Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s Office (WCPO) from 2017 to 2022. The analysis relies on currently available data resources at the WCPO and examines decision-making at four different junctures in the prosecutorial process: 1) case approval (i.e., warrant authorization) and charge selection, 2) habitual-offender designation (under Michigan law), 3) plea bargaining, and 4) diversion and deferral opportunities. Racial disparities appear most visibly at the earliest stages of the criminal justice process, with People of Color substantially overrepresented in the warrant requests the WCPO receives from law enforcement. The data further indicate that, conditional on receiving a warrant request, the WCPO is somewhat more likely to charge People of Color with a crime, although the practical difference in charging rates is small. Furthermore, the analysis uncovers statistically significant racial differences in charging outcomes among defendants with at least one authorized warrant, with the WCPO charging People of Color with more total offenses and more severe offenses than white people on average. Interestingly, the data also indicate that People of Color fare somewhat better than white people with respect to habitual-offender designation, though the use of such designations by the WCPO in recent years is rare. Currently available data indicate no other notable racial disparities in WCPO decision-making during the period of study. Limitations in current data-collection practices represent the main impediment to further examination of WCPO decision-making. Improving and expanding data collection and organization efforts will allow the WCPO to 1) better understand how disparities arise at its early phases of prosecution (e.g., charging) and 2) further explore other decision-making junctures (including plea bargaining and diversion and deferral opportunities) where data are insufficiently available.

By Emily Grisé; Alexander Cooke; David Cooper; Zane Oueja; Willem Klumpenhouwer; Amy HobbsOn transit systems across the United States, rising rates of drug use along with deteriorating safety conditions for customers and staff have become increasingly pressing and complex issues for transit agencies to solve. Many challenges surround agencies’ responses to drug use on transit, such as inconsistent data collection and the low uptake of support services.

TCRP Synthesis 179: The Impacts of and Response to Drug Use on Transit, from TRB's Transit Cooperative Research Program, documents and synthesizes the current practices of transit agencies in addressing the consumption and distribution of illegal drugs on their systems, as well as the resulting effects on customer and staff safety and security.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Transportation Research Board; Transit Cooperative Research Program. 2025. p91.

By Carrie Leonetti

This article presents a systematic and critical assessment of the reliability of forensic science in New Zealand. It documents the types of forensic-science being offered in criminal cases, the party presenting the evidence, the experts’ affiliations, how often there are challenges to the admissibility of the expert evidence and their timing in the proceedings, how often experts rely upon the uniqueness assumption, and how often experts testify to an individualised identification or ‘match’ of a source of forensic evidence. It finds that several of the common forensic disciplines in the criminal justice system in New Zealand have been the subject of critique and criticism internationally, the most common source of expert evidence was presented by the prosecution and provided by institutional police laboratories, and in most cases the forensic expert testified either to the uniqueness assumption or to an individualised match determination. It concludes that the New Zealand Parliament should amend the Evidence Act 2006 to require a demonstration of foundational validity and as-applied reliability as a precondition to the admissibility of any purported scientific evidence.

Common Law World Review, Online First, March 2024, 26pg