By  Don Stemen, Beth M. Huebner, Marisa Omori, Elizabeth Webster, Alessandra Early, and Luis Torres

Although guilty pleas are the modal method for criminal case resolution in the US, relatively little attention has been paid to the plea negotiation process. Research suggests that prosecutors drive plea decision-making; however, the decision process is largely hidden and informal. Consequently, little is known about the role that prosecutors and other criminal justice actors play across the process, and even less is known about how these mechanisms have changed over time, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unpacking these plea negotiation decisions are especially key to understanding racial and ethnic disparities in criminal case processing.

Funded as part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Safety and Justice Challenge Research Consortium, the current study considers guilty plea negotiation processes and outcomes in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, and St. Louis County, Missouri. Both offices are currently led by reform-oriented attorneys, are are medium-sized offices serving urban and suburban jurisdictions. Over the long tenure of elected District Attorney John Chisholm in Milwaukee, the office has implemented innovative prosecution models such as community prosecution units and diversion programs. In St Louis, recently elected District Attorney Wesley Bell is the first Black person to hold the office, and he ran on a platform of ensuring equity in the system and reducing mass incarceration. The goal of the study is to explore how prosecutors and other court actors approach and make decisions surrounding the plea negotiation process, in addition to investigating the factors that affect plea outcomes. The data used in this report include narratives from interviews with and surveys of local stakeholders including prosecutors, public defenders, judges, private attorneys, and system-involved persons. The report also centers on administrative data collected through agencies' case management systems for criminal cases filed in Milwaukee and St. Louis Counties through 2020.

Safety and Justice Challenge, 2022. 49p.

By Jarred Williams

As one component of the Strengthening the Foundation – A Researcher and Practitioner Partnership project funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, this research brief provides a snapshot of the existing evidence base behind the adult drug court model, while also identifying potential areas of interest to seed the next generation of drug court research. Our findings document the data-driven successes of the drug court model, the evidence-based mechanisms that are associated with positive participant outcomes, and lastly, our recommendations for future research. Continuing to seek answers through rigorous study will open up exciting avenues for future research and programming to continue to provide the best possible treatment for participants. 

New York: Center for Justice Innovation, 2023. 16p.

By Ronald Wright and Jenny Roberts

This review collects and critiques the academic literature on criminal defense lawyering, with an emphasis on empirical work. Research on criminal defense attorneys in the United States has traditionally emphasized scarcity of resources: too many people facing criminal charges who are “too poor to pay” for counsel and not enough funding to pay for the constitutionally mandated lawyers. Scholars have focused on the capacity of different delivery systems, such as public defender offices, to change the ultimate outcomes in criminal cases within their tight budgetary constraints. Over the decades, however, theoretical understandings of the defense attorney's work have expanded to include client interests outside the criminal courtroom, reaching the broader social conditions connected to the alleged criminal act. Researchers have responded by asking a broader range of questions about the effectiveness of defense counsel outside the courtroom and by using improved data to study the effectiveness of lawyers at discrete procedural stages.

Annual Review of Criminology. Vol. 6:241-264 (Volume publication date January 2023)

By Christopher Slobogin and Sarah Brayne

This review focuses on government use of technology to observe, collect, or record potential criminal activity in real-time, as contrasted with “transaction surveillance” that involves government efforts to access already-existing records and exploit Big Data, topics that have been the focus of previous reviews (Brayne 2018, Ridgeway 2018). Even so limited, surveillance technologies come in many guises, including closed-circuit television, automated license plate and facial readers, aerial cameras, and GPS tracking. Also classifiable as surveillance technology are devices such as thermal and electromagnetic imagers that can “see” through walls and clothing. Finally, surveillance includes wiretapping and other forms of communication interception. The following discussion briefly examines the limited evidence we have about the prevalence and effectiveness of these technologies and then describes the law governing surveillance, focusing principally on constitutional doctrine, and how it might—and might not—limit use of these technologies in the future.

  Annual Review of Criminology,  2023. 6:219–40 

By Eric R. Collins

  Two observations about the operation of the criminal legal system are so widely accepted that they seem undeniable: First, it is a system of pleas, not trials. Second, the system is too punitive and must be reformed. One could easily think, therefore, that the Federal Rules of Evidence, which apply intentionally and explicitly only to the adjudicatory phase of criminal procedure, have nothing to do with the solution. And legal scholarship focusing on decarceration largely reflects this assumption: while many have explored reforms that target front end system actors and processes that lead people into the system (e.g. police, prosecutors, broad criminal statutes), and back end reforms that that seek to lessen the toll of punitive policies (sentencing reform, alternatives to incarceration), markedly fewer have explored how what happens in the middle — adjudication — contributes to mass incarceration. While this oversight makes sense, it is not justified because it is also equally undeniable that plea bargaining happens in the shadow of trial. This Article examines how the shadow of trial — specifically, the shadow cast by evidentiary rulings about the accused person’s past — contributes to the perpetuation of an expansive carceral state. It identifies how evidence rules have been relaxed, tweaked, specialized, or unmoored from their foundational principles in ways that facilitate prosecution and conviction or essentially force plea deals – without regard for the truth, fairness, or justice of the outcome. In other words, it identifies ways that evidence law undermines the Rules’ primary purpose, which is to advance fair proceedings “to the end of ascertaining the truth and securing a just determination.”   

Fordham Urban Law Journal, 50(3): 2023. 

Amanda Y. Agan, Jennifer L. Doleac & Anna Harvey

Communities across the United States are reconsidering the public safety benefits of prosecuting nonviolent misdemeanor offenses, yet there is little empirical evidence to inform policy in this area. In this paper we report the first estimates of the causal effects of misdemeanor prosecution on defendants' subsequent criminal justice involvement. We leverage the as-if random assignment of nonviolent misdemeanor cases to Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) who decide whether a case should be prosecuted in the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office in Massachusetts. These ADAs vary in the average leniency of their prosecution decisions. We find that, for the marginal defendant, non-prosecution of a nonviolent misdemeanor offense leads to a 53% reduction in the likelihood of a new criminal complaint, and to a 60% reduction in the number of new criminal complaints, over the next two years. These local average treatment effects are largest for defendants without prior criminal records, suggesting that averting criminal record acquisition is an important mechanism driving our findings. We also present evidence that a recent policy change in Suffolk County imposing a presumption of nonprosecution for nonviolent misdemeanor offenses had similar beneficial effects, decreasing the likelihood of subsequent criminal justice involvement

Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2022. 103p.

By Scrutinize

Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Zimroth Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at NYU School of Law

An analysis of public pretrial data from 2020-2022 reveals that some New York City judges are disproportionately carceral, i.e., these judges are substantially more likely to order pretrial detention
than their peers, even when accounting for factors such as the severity of the case and the defendant’s
prior criminal history. The fourteen judges who exhibited the most carceral discretion compared to their peers are Felicia Mennin, Gerald Lebovits, Quynda Santacroce, Josh Hanshaft, Kerry Ward, Bruna DiBiase, Gerianne Abriano, Beth Beller, Phyllis Chu, Alan Schiff, Tara Collins, Derefim Neckles, Joseph McCormack, and Lumarie Maldonado-Cruz. These fourteen judges’ disproportionately carceral decisions over 2.5 years resulted in an estimated 580 additional people detained, 154 additional years of pretrial detention, and over $77 million of additional costs borne by New York City taxpayers.

New York: The Authors, 2023. 29p.

By Hannah E. Meyers

  All prosecutors are required to hand over relevant material to defense attorneys prior to trial, a process referred to as “discovery.” Discovery is fundamental to a fair trial because it is impossible for defendants to make informed plea-bargain decisions if they do not know the strength of the evidence that prosecutors have against them. However, New York’s 2019 discovery statute, Criminal Procedure Law Article 245 (“245”), has crippled the state’s criminal justice system with an untenable compliance burden that prevents it from being either just or appropriately adversarial. It has forced district attorneys’ offices to triage cases and has harmed both the victims of crime and, in the long run, many criminal offenders. The NYS Legislature can correct the systemic harms caused by 245 and increase fairness to defendants, reduce administrative burdens on police and prosecutors, and rebalance risk so that the consequences of noncompliance align with substantive impacts on due process. New York’s new discovery rules, which went into effect in January 2020, were such an extreme and far-reaching version of “reform” that even famously progressive Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg recently complained: “My Office’s lawyers and support staff continue their herculean efforts in managing discovery-related obligations.” The Legal Aid Society, which represents and advocates for criminal defendants, correctly crowed that, rather than simply reinforcing prosecutors’ discovery duties, as intended, 245 “is transforming New York State’s criminal justice system.” The new discovery obligations are indeed so herculean that NYS prosecutors have been able to meet them within the mandated time frames on only 21% of cases. In statewide local courts, they are met on 16% of cases, and in NYC local courts, that number dwindles to 13%. And because discovery must now be met within New York’s preexisting “speedy trial” time windows, on pain of automatic dismissal, thousands of viable cases have been thrown out—not because justice demands it but simply because the compliance burden has proved too great. In NYC courts, dismissals rose from 44% of all disposed cases in 2019, to 69% in 2021. Statewide, dismissals rose by 14% in that period. Meanwhile, guilty pleas fell in NYC from 45% to 21%—and statewide, from 49% to 33%—as defense attorneys have, correctly, become more confident that cases will be dismissed rather than go to trial.

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2023. 43p.

By John F. Pfaff

Given the undeniable role that prosecutorial discretion has played in driving mass incarceration, it makes sense to turn to them to scale it back as well. This has certainly been a central motivation of the progressive/reform prosecutor movement that started in the late 2000s. And while this movement has had some notable successes, recent years have shed some important light on the limits it faces as well. In this essay, I want to focus on how the county-ness of prosecutors hems in their power from two different directions. On the one hand, as county officials, prosecutors—at least in most major urban areas—have a large number of constituents who live in the suburbs and regularly oppose reforms … of policies that by and large do not affect them. It’s telling that many, if not most, reform prosecutors have been elected in counties that either have no suburbs at all within their borders (Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis) or where the suburbs are a small fraction of the overall population (Boston, Portland). It’s clear across a wide range of cities that the core support for reform DAs comes from Black communities with high levels of violence, i.e., the communities that bear the brunt of DA decisionmaking. The more suburban voters in a county, however, the more diluted those voices become. On the other hand, as county officials, prosecutors operate at the mercy of state officials, who have a wide range of powers for clipping their wings: legislatures can give state AGs concurrent jurisdiction, for example, and in many places governors can remove elected DAs or take their cases away from them. While states are shielded from (some) federal interventions by the 10th Amendment, county officials have no such protection, as reform DAs in GOP-controlled states are increasingly beginning to discover.

(March 4, 2023). Fordham Urban Law Journal, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4378322

By Brittany Friedman and Mary Pattillo
  Monetary sanctions mandated in state statutes include fines, fees, restitution, and other legal costs imposed on persons convicted of crimes and other legal violations. Drawing on content analysis of current legislative statutes in Illinois pertaining to monetary sanctions, we ask three questions: What are defendants expected to pay for and why? What accommodations exist for defendants’ poverty? What are the consequences for nonpayment? We find that neoliberal logics of personal responsibility and carceral expansion suffuse these laws, establishing a basis for transferring public costs onto criminal defendants, offering little relief for poverty, and supporting severe additional penalties for unpaid debt. Statutory inequality legally authorizes further impoverishment of the poor, thereby increasing inequality. Major related organizing and advocacy work, however, has created an opening for significant changes toward greater fairness.  

  RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 5(1): 173–96.

By Duke Law School, Wilson Center for Science and Justice

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Durham, NC: Duke Law School, Wilson Center for Science and Justice, 2021. 18p.

 By William Crozier , Brandon Garrett & Thomas Maher

 There has been an explosion of debt in our North Carolina criminal courts, much of it that has not been paid and likely never can or will be paid. In over 1.72 million cases total – and 120,000 cases each year criminal courts in North Carolina have imposed fees that a person cannot or does not pay. A failure to comply with the court order to pay, or an “FTC,” is then entered in the case. Over 650,000 people, or one in twelve adults in North Carolina currently have such unpaid criminal court debt. This largely uncollectible debt may total well over one hundred million dollars. This debt disproportionately burdens minority residents of North Carolina. Much of this debt arises in low-level traffic cases and infractions.

Durham, NC: The Center, 2020. 20p.

By Maria Rafael

Nearly every person convicted in a Washington court faces the heavy burden of court debt.2 The vast majority of Washingtonians with criminal cases—as many as 90 percent—meet the indigency standard, indicating that they have limited or no ability to repay their court debt.3 People with court debt are more likely to already be burdened by other types of debt, making it even more difficult for them to free themselves of the financial burden of LFOs.

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2023. 10p.

By Marcus Smith and Seumas Miller

This book undertakes a multifaceted and integrated examination of biometric identification, including the current state of the technology, how it is being used, the key ethical issues, and the implications for law and regulation. The five chapters examine the main forms of contemporary biometrics–fingerprint recognition, facial recognition and DNA identification– as well the integration of biometric data with other forms of personal data, analyses key ethical concepts in play, including privacy, individual autonomy, collective responsibility, and joint ownership rights, and proposes a raft of principles to guide the regulation of biometrics in liberal democracies. Biometric identification technology is developing rapidly and being implemented more widely, along with other forms of information technology. As products, services and communication moves online, digital identity and security is becoming more important. Biometric identification facilitates this transition. Citizens now use biometrics to access a smartphone or obtain a passport; law enforcement agencies use biometrics in association with CCTV to identify a terrorist in a crowd, or identify a suspect via their fingerprints or DNA; and companies use biometrics to identify their customers and employees. In some cases the use of biometrics is governed by law, in others the technology has developed and been implemented so quickly that, perhaps because it has been viewed as a valuable security enhancement, laws regulating its use have often not been updated to reflect new applications. However, the technology associated with biometrics raises significant ethical problems, including in relation to individual privacy, ownership of biometric data, dual use and, more generally, as is illustrated by the increasing use of biometrics in authoritarian states such as China, the potential for unregulated biometrics to undermine fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Resolving these ethical problems is a vital step towards more effective regulation.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2021. 99p.

By The U.S. Government Accountability Office 

  Online marketing and communication platforms can enable sex trafficking— the commercial sexual exploitation of adults through force, fraud or coercion, or children under the age of 18 (with or without force, fraud, or coercion)—by making it easier for traffickers to exploit victims and connect with buyers. Section 3 of FOSTA established criminal penalties for those who promote or facilitate prostitution and sex trafficking through their control of online platforms. It also allows for those injured by an aggravated violation involving the promotion of prostitution of five or more people or reckless disregard of sex trafficking to recover damages in a federal civil action. It also makes federal criminal restitution mandatory for aggravated offenses contributing to sex trafficking. FOSTA includes a provision for GAO to provide detailed information on restitution and civil damages. This report examines: (1) DOJ enforcement efforts against online platforms that promote prostitution and sex trafficking, from 2014 through 2020; and (2) the extent to which criminal restitution and civil damages have been sought and awarded for aggravated violations under section 3 of FOSTA. GAO reviewed federal criminal cases brought against those who controlled platforms in the online commercial sex market from 2014 through 2020; visited a selection of online platforms in this market; and conducted a legal search to identify criminal and civil cases brought pursuant to section 3 of FOSTA. GAO also interviewed DOJ officials and representatives from third parties. 

Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2021. 56p.

By Charlotte Herriott

This book provides an in-depth examination of current, high-profile debates about the use of sexual history evidence in rape trials and its impact on jurors. In doing so, it presents findings of the first mock jury dataset in England and Wales to explore how jurors interpret, discuss, and rely upon such evidence within their deliberations. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative insights from the 18 mock jury panels, the book highlights the complex, nuanced and intersectional impact of sexual history evidence within the deliberative ideal. Indeed, findings exemplified routine and ongoing prejudicial framings of sexual history amongst jurors, and frequent endorsement of rape myths that served to mistakenly infer relevance and undermine the perceived credibility of the complainant. The findings discussed within this book are therefore key to addressing the current knowledge gap around the impact of sexual history evidence and are embedded within broader discussions about evidential legitimacy in rape trials. The book draws on good practice observed in other jurisdictions to makes numerous recommendations for change. Aiming to inform academic, policy, and legislative discussions in this area, Sexual History Evidence in Rape Trials will be of great interest to students and scholars of Criminal Law and Criminology, as well as policy makers and legal practitioners.

London; New York: Routledge, 2023. 191p.

Edited by  Mark Maguire, Ursula Rao, and Nils Zurawski

From biometrics to predictive policing, contemporary security relies on sophisticated scientific evidence-gathering and knowledge-making focused on the human body. Bringing together new anthropological perspectives on the complexities of security in the present moment, the contributors to Bodies as Evidence reveal how bodies have become critical sources of evidence that is organized and deployed to classify, recognize, and manage human life. Through global case studies that explore biometric identification, border control, forensics, predictive policing, and counterterrorism, the contributors show how security discourses and practices that target the body contribute to new configurations of knowledge and power. At the same time, margins of error, unreliable technologies, and a growing suspicion of scientific evidence in a “post-truth” era contribute to growing insecurity, especially among marginalized populations.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 257p.

By Kaman Maxine Clarke

Since its inception in 2001, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been met with resistance by various African states and their leaders, who see the court as a new iteration of colonial violence and control. In Affective Justice Kamari Maxine Clarke explores the African Union's pushback against the ICC in order to theorize affect's role in shaping forms of justice in the contemporary period. Drawing on fieldwork in The Hague, the African Union in Addis Ababa, sites of post-election violence in Kenya, and Boko Haram's circuits in Northern Nigeria, Clarke formulates the concept of affective justice—an emotional response to competing interpretations of justice—to trace how affect becomes manifest in judicial practices. By detailing the effects of the ICC’s all-African indictments, she outlines how affective responses to these call into question the "objectivity" of the ICC’s mission to protect those victimized by violence and prosecute perpetrators of those crimes. In analyzing the effects of such cases, Clarke provides a fuller theorization of how people articulate what justice is and the mechanisms through which they do so.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 384p.

Edited by Wojciech Jasin´ski and Karolina Kremens  

This book presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of the substantive and procedural aspects of compensation for wrongful convictions in European countries and the USA, as well as the standard derived from the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. The collection draws comparative conclusions as to the similarities and differences between selected jurisdictions and assesses the effectiveness of the national compensation schemes. This enables the designing of an optimum model of compensation, offering accessibility and effectiveness to the victims of miscarriages of justice and being acceptable to jurisdictions based on common law, and civil law traditions, as well as inquisitorial and adversarial types of criminal process. Moreover, the discussion of the minimum European standard as established in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights enables readers to identify how the Strasbourg Court can contribute to strengthening the compensation scheme. The book will be essential reading for students, academics and policymakers working in the areas of criminal law and procedure.

New York: London: Routledge, 2022. 261p.

By Karolina Kremens

This comparative analysis examines the scope of prosecutorial powers at different phases of criminal investigation in four countries: the United States, Italy, Poland, and Germany. Since in all four the number of criminal cases decided without trial is constantly increasing, criminal investigation has become central in the criminal process. The work asks: who should be in charge of this stage of the process? Prosecutors have gained tremendous powers to influence the outcome of the criminal cases, including powers once reserved for judges. In a system in which the role of the trial is diminishing and the significance of criminal investigation is growing, this book questions whether the prosecutor's powers at the early stage of the process should be enhanced. Using a problem-oriented approach, the book provides a parallel analysis of each country along five possible spheres of prosecutorial engagement: commencing criminal investigation; conducting criminal investigation, undertaking initial charging decisions; imposing coercive measures; and discontinuing criminal investigation. Using the competing adversarial–inquisitorial models as a framework, the focus is on the prosecutor as a crucial figure in the criminal process and investigation. The insights of this book will be of interest and relevance to students and academics in criminal justice, criminology, law, and public policy, as well as policymakers, government officials, and others interested in legal reform.

London; New York: Routledge, 2021. 379p.