Debundling accountability: prosecutor and public defender elections in Florida

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan C. McCannon
Keyword(s):  
Plea Bargaining ◽  
Public Defender ◽  
Plea Bargain ◽  
Conviction Rate ◽  
Present Evidence ◽  
Public Defenders ◽  
Jury Trials ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Trial Phase

I explore the impact of public defender and prosecutor elections using caseload data from Florida. While most states within the US use popular elections to select and retain prosecutors, public defenders are typically appointed positions. Florida is novel in that for both positions, popular, partisan elections are used to select the office’s leader. I first document important distortions in pre-trial case handling. A public defender re-election is associated with an increase in the proportion of cases resolved via plea bargaining, while prosecutor re-elections are associated with less plea bargaining. At the trial phase, I present evidence that public defender re-elections are associated with a decrease in the proportion of jury trials that result in a conviction, while a prosecutor re-election coincides with an increase in the conviction rate. The results are consistent with voters holding both elected officials accountable for doing their job. Public defenders obtain plea bargains at a higher rate and secure acquittals for their clients when up for re-election. Prosecutors do not plea bargain as much and win at trial when up for re-election.

scholarly journals Legal Complexity and the Transformation of the Criminal Process: The Origins of Plea Bargaining

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 183-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm M. Feeley
Keyword(s):  
Standard Form ◽  
United States Supreme Court ◽  
Plea Bargaining ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jury Trial ◽  
Criminal Cases ◽  
Plea Bargain ◽  
Jury Trials ◽  
Adversary System ◽  
Necessary Evil

The standard form of disposition for most English and American criminal cases is the guilty plea, by means of a plea bargain. Jury trials are the rare exception rather than the rule. Although plea bargaining is the subject of a huge scholarly literature analyzing its nature and functioning, there is a much smaller literature on its origins and development. Most of the literature is highly critical, and much of it rests upon a belief that bureaucratic justice has come to replace the vigorous adversarial jury trial. Some critics lament “our vanishing jury”. Others decry the rise of “technocratic justice”. And still others warn that we are witnessing the “twilight of the adversary process”, or the decline of the adversary system. Even those who defend plea bargaining, such as justices on the United States Supreme Court, tend to regard it as a “necessary evil” required as an expedient to cope with the rising tide of caseloads rather than an ideal process.Despite important differences of emphasis among these and still other commentators, most share an important commonalty; they adopt a form of functional analysis that understands plea bargaining as an adaptation to caseload pressures. Hence the power of the metaphor “the twilight” of the adversary process. This assessment seems plausible in light of pervasive plea bargaining and the crush of caseloads in American and English courts.

A Permanent Crisis

Free Justice ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 117-150
Author(s):  
Sara Mayeux
Keyword(s):  
Plea Bargaining ◽  
Public Defender ◽  
Legal Aid ◽  
Public Defenders ◽  
Indigent Defense ◽  
Private Charity ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Trial Advocacy ◽  
Reform Organizations

This chapter traces the rocky implementation of Gideon v. Wainwright between 1963 and 1973, continuing the Massachusetts case study begun in chapter 2 and also addressing developments in Philadelphia and other localities. Although states could technically comply with Gideon in a variety of ways (e.g. appointing private counsel case-by-case),many lawyers and reform organizations interpreted Gideon as a broader mandate to establish and expand institutionalized public defender offices. The Ford Foundation and the National Legal Aid and Defender Association (NLADA) embarked upon the National Defender Project, an ambitious nationwide effort. As a result of such efforts, the 1960s witnessed change and growth in public defender offices around the country. In Massachusetts, for example, the organization initially founded as a voluntary defender was converted from a private charity into a statewide public defender agency, hired dozens of new lawyers, and was soon handling tens of thousands of cases each year. Yet, criticisms quickly emerged that public defenders had overwhelming caseloads and resorted too often to plea bargaining, rather than trial advocacy. Reformers diagnosed a new problem, the “indigent defense crisis” that persists today.

scholarly journals Unveiling Wrongful Convictions Between the U.S. and Italy

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-123
Author(s):  
Luca Lupária ◽  
Chiara Greco
Keyword(s):  
Justice System ◽  
Plea Bargaining ◽  
National Registry ◽  
National Database ◽  
Positive Aspect ◽  
Wrongful Convictions ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S

This paper focuses on the issue of wrongful convictions as it emerged in the US during the nineties and subsequently gained attention throughout Europe. The first paragraph focuses on the factors that have brought the issue of wrongful convictions to light and on the impact that the US experience has had on the European Criminal Systems’ acknowledgment of the problem. The second paragraph suggests that the perspective of the Italian jurist might be privileged when confronted with the topic of wrongful convictions, as the Italian criminal justice system was designed to combine the best aspects of both inquisitorial and adversarial systems. For this reason, one would expect the Italian system as generating few wrongful convictions. Facts and figures, however, do not support this expectation. The third paragraph therefore focuses on those that might be the main causes for wrongful convictions within the Italian system, and it subsequently points out one major flaw of the Italian approach to the issue of wrongful convictions: the absence of a national database providing detailed information on previous cases of wrongful convictions. The paper then takes the US National Registry of Exonerations and the establishment of CIUs as positive examples from which Italy should learn. The conclusive paragraph highlights one positive aspect of the Italian system, i.e. the limitations to plea bargaining, and suggests that they might be taken as an example in other countries’ reforms of such mechanism.

Systematic review methodology for development: An example from microfinance

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carina Van Rooyen ◽  
Ruth Stewart ◽  
Thea De Wet
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
International Development ◽  
Health Sector ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Systematic Review Methodology ◽  
Development Interventions ◽  
The Us ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Evidence Based Decision Making

Big international development donors such as the UK’s Department for International Development and USAID have recently started using systematic review as a methodology to assess the effectiveness of various development interventions to help them decide what is the ‘best’ intervention to spend money on. Such an approach to evidence-based decision-making has long been practiced in the health sector in the US, UK, and elsewhere but it is relatively new in the development field. In this article we use the case of a systematic review of the impact of microfinance on the poor in sub-Saharan African to indicate how systematic review as a methodology can be used to assess the impact of specific development interventions.

The Impact of Monetary and Fiscal Policies on the Stock Market in the United States (U.S); Evidence from Linear ARDL Framework

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-132
Author(s):  
Aref Emamian
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Stock Market ◽  
The United States ◽  
Real Effective Exchange Rate ◽  
Annual Data ◽  
Fiscal Policies ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The Us ◽  
Short Run ◽  
The Impact

This study examines the impact of monetary and fiscal policies on the stock market in the United States (US), were used. By employing the method of Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) developed by Pesaran et al. (2001). Annual data from the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, from 1986 to 2017 pertaining to the American economy, the results show that both policies play a significant role in the stock market. We find a significant positive effect of real Gross Domestic Product and the interest rate on the US stock market in the long run and significant negative relationship effect of Consumer Price Index (CPI) and broad money on the US stock market both in the short run and long run. On the other hand, this study only could support the significant positive impact of tax revenue and significant negative impact of real effective exchange rate on the US stock market in the short run while in the long run are insignificant. Keywords: ARDL, monetary policy, fiscal policy, stock market, United States

Drones, Surveillance, and Violence: Theory and Evidence from a US Drone Program

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asfandyar Mir ◽  
Dylan Moore
Keyword(s):  
Air Power ◽  
Affected Area ◽  
Qualitative Evidence ◽  
The Us ◽  
Drone Strikes ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Group Trust

Abstract We investigate the impact of the US drone program in Pakistan on insurgent violence. Using details about US-Pakistan counterterrorism cooperation and geocoded violence data, we show that the program was associated with monthly reductions of around nine to thirteen insurgent attacks and fifty-one to eighty-six casualties in the area affected by the program. This change was sizable, as in the year before the program, the affected area experienced around twenty-one attacks and one hundred casualties per month. Additional quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that this drop is attributable to the drone program. However, the damage caused in strikes during the program cannot fully account for the reduction. Instead, anticipatory effects induced by the program played a prominent role in subduing violence. These effects stemmed from the insurgents’ perception of the risk of being targeted in drone strikes; their efforts to avoid targeting severely compromised their movement and communication abilities, in addition to eroding within-group trust. These findings contrast with prominent perspectives on air-power, counterinsurgency, and US counterterrorism, suggesting select drone deployments can be an effective tool of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism.

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