Mediation in Criminal Misdemeanor Cases

Diversion of criminal misdemeanors to mediation by district attorneys has been practiced since the 1970s, but research on its impact on critical outcomes like recidivism is scant and outdated. This quasi-experimental study compares 78 mediated cases from a county that diverts cases to mediation with 128 cases in a similar neighboring county that does not, using phone surveys and case review to ask whether recidivism in mediated cases differs from cases prosecuted or treated as usual over the subsequent year. Controlling for case factors and attitudes toward conflict, a case that is not mediated was five times more likely to result in judicial action, five times more likely to result in jury trial demand, and ten times more likely to result in supervised probation or jail time, and mediated cases were almost five times less likely to return to criminal court in the subsequent year than those that were not mediated.

Economic Sanctions in Criminal Justice

Economic sanctions are court-imposed financial obligations aimed at punishing offenders (fines), funding the government (costs/fees, forfeitures), and compensating victims (restitution). This book examines economic sanctions in the United States, with a focus on the multilevel, multimethod research my students and I conducted in Pennsylvania. The 15 studies described in the book are multiplistic in terms of academic discipline (social psychology, criminology, law), levels of analysis (individual, county, state), actors within the system (victims, offenders, probation officers, district attorneys, judges), type of process involved (imposition, payment, rearrest), and research methods (analyses of state-level computerized archives, coding of county-level paper court and probation records, surveys of individuals, a field-experiment, and follow-up involving probationers). Most of the studies examined the imposition, payment, and effect of paying restitution. Research across methods indicated that offenders are often unable to pay their court-ordered sanctions, that restitution is generally not paid in full, and that both offenders and victims are responsive to procedural justice. Experimental results indicated that randomly assigned probationers delinquent in making payments who received letters informing them of the restitution amounts they owed were more likely to pay restitution and less likely to commit a new crime as compared to randomly assigned delinquent probationers who did not receive letters or who received letters giving them a rationale for payment. Three policy recommendations are made concerning what is fair and effective for victims, offenders, and society: (1) mandating restitution, (2) making fines contingent on ability to pay, and (3) ending the imposition of costs and fees.

The Necessity of Performance Measures for Prosecutors

Local prosecutors are responsible for 95 percent of criminal cases in the United States—their charging decisions holding enormous influence over the number of people incarcerated and the length of sentences served. Performance metrics are a tool that can align the vision of elected prosecutors with the tangible actions of their offices’ line attorneys. The right metrics can provide clarity to individual line attorneys around the mission of the office and the goals of their job. Historically, however, prosecutor offices have relied on evaluation metrics that incentivize individual attorneys to prioritize more punitive responses and volume-driven activity—such as tracking the number of cases processed, indictments, guilty pleas, convictions, and sentence lengths. Under these past approaches, funding, budgeting, and promotional decisions are frequently linked to regressive measures that fail to account for just results. As more Americans have embraced the need to end mass incarceration, a new wave of reform-minded district attorneys have won elections. To ensure they are accountable to the voters who elected them into office and achieve the changes they championed, they must align measures of success with new priorities for their offices. New performance metrics predicated on the goals of reducing incarceration and enhancing fairness can shrink prison and jail populations, while improving public trust and promoting healthier and safer communities. The authors propose a new set of metrics for elected prosecutors to consider in designing performance evaluations, both for their offices and for individual attorneys. The authors also suggest that for these new performance measures to effectively drive decarceration practices, they must be coupled with careful, thoughtful implementation and critical data-management infrastructure.

Conditional dismissal as an alternative to the traditional criminal proceedings in Israel

The overloaded court system, along with the increasing recognition of the harm inflicted upon offenders by the criminal court procedure, led, in 2013, to the enactment of a new criminal-administrative procedure, termed “conditional dismissals,” which diverts minor offenses from the courts to be settled by prosecution authorities. This preliminary study examines the profile of 1750 cases of conditional dismissals concluded by district attorneys and police prosecution division between 2016 and 2018 and whether some notions of the “restorative justice” model were implemented. The findings indicate that both district attorneys and police prosecution division had initial difficulties in implementing the notion of diverting cases from the criminal court process. Over half of the cases in both agencies were for bodily injury and property offenses. There is a significant difference regarding the majority of the dismissal terms between the district attorneys and the police prosecution division. The results further indicate that 4.5% of all dismissals contained only restorative stipulations (especially in sex offenses), and one-third contained restorative stipulations along with punitive stipulations. The findings also show that the district attorneys are more inclined to use restorative terms, while the police prosecution division is more inclined to use punitive terms. The article discusses the possible explanations for these findings and the significant differences in the application of restorative practice between the police prosecution division and the district attorneys.

User Funded? Using Budgets to Examine the Scope and Revenue Impact of Fines and Fees in the Criminal Justice System

Criminal justice system fines and fees are a source of revenue for courts, district attorneys, probation departments, and other actors both inside and outside of the justice system. Because these departments rely on fine and fee revenue to partially fund their budgets, they may be incentivized to oppose reforms that would reduce fine and fee collections. Using budget documents from counties and a sample of municipalities in Florida and New York, the authors find that budget reports provide more detailed data on fines and fees than are available from other data sources, including information on which types of fines and fees are collected and how much revenue criminal justice fines and fees provide, both on a per-capita basis and as a share of the total jurisdiction budget. This paper presents a replicable methodology for future research in how to use local government budget documents to evaluate fine and fee collections. A larger, forthcoming study will use this methodology to examine fine and fee collections in five states.

American Prosecutors as Principals and Agents

The pervasiveness of their influence arguably makes prosecutors the most consequential actors in the American criminal justice system. Armed with discretion over which cases to pursue, what charges to file, and which issue areas to prioritize, prosecutors play a decisive role in determining what progresses from investigation to the courtroom. It is their charge to do justice in each case, but that obligation hardly forecloses the influence of politics on their decisions. Despite their centrality, however, prosecutors and their behavior have failed to garner even a fraction of the attention that scholars have directed toward law enforcement, correctional systems, or judges. The discretion of American prosecutors is theoretically immense; there are few formal constraints upon it. If a federal or state prosecutor declines to pursue a case that has been referred to him or her, that declination decision is essentially immune from judicial review. But these formalisms come with more practical limitations. At the federal level, United States Attorneys are appointed by the president and, therefore, are expected to carry out an administration’s general policy priorities. In the states, most district attorneys answer to the electorate, which imposes its own constraints on a prosecutor’s freedom of action. Chief prosecutors—state and federal—are simultaneously principals to their subordinates and agents of the people or the president. If those considerations were not enough, American prosecutors must be mindful of still other factors. How might their actions today impact their future career paths? What influence might legislative changes, public opinion, or judicial rulings have on how they operate? Scholarship on prosecutors has addressed some of these questions, but we still lack a good understanding of all the ways in which politics infects prosecutorial decision-making. As “progressive prosecutors”—many who are former public defenders—continue to win office, new questions will arise about how far prosecutors can push reform of the criminal justice system. A major looming question is how voters conditioned to law-and-order rhetoric will evaluate the new prosecutors. Some preliminary work shows that non-White prosecutors tend to reduce rates of incarceration, while Republican-affiliated prosecutors increase them.

Prosecuting Attorneys in a Democracy – A California Perspective

A prosecuting attorney in a democracy is very important in the processing of criminal cases- from pre-filing to final appeal. Much of the involvement of the District Attorney, both before a criminal case is filed, and during the prosecution of the case, stems from the “Exclusionary Rule”. It is the usual case that the police will bring their investigation, their arrest warrant or search warrant affidavit to a District Attorney to review it prior to taking it to the judge. In this connection, District Attorneys will themselves reject 5-10% of the warrant requests submitted to them for approval, often asking law enforcement to do some further investigation before resubmitting the warrant. Furthermore, because of the Doctrine of Separation of Powers, only the District Attorney or the California State Attorney General can make the decision to file or not file a case. This Article illustrates the impact of such discretion. The problem of democracy is strictly connected to the process of DA’s selection, what has also been here presented. Another fundamental issue is a role of DA in voir dire, mainly because jury trials are guaranteed by the federal Constitution and are associated with the idea of democracy. Separation of Powers and Judicial Control of the DA, the police, and the sentencing of those convicted of crimes have been analyzed from the perspective of the California law. Additionally, the article includes final comments on the technological progress and its impact on criminal law and democracy. All the conclusions have been made in reference to Author’s experience as Assistant DA in California.

Prosecutorial Involvement in Exoneration

The current literature on wrongful convictions documents the legal, psychological, and institutional barriers that prosecutors face in considering post-conviction claims of innocence. However, less is known about how the local court context may relate to prosecutors’ decisions to engage in wrongful conviction investigations. To address this gap, the present study explores how characteristics of the local court community are related to the likelihood of prosecutors assisting, actively opposing, or remaining uninvolved in post-conviction claims of innocence. Specifically, we examine prosecutorial involvement in exonerations from three levels: case-factors, organizational factors, and county-context factors. Using archival data on the exonerations of factually innocent individuals (N = 75), we find that case-related factors are the strongest predictors of prosecutors’ involvement in exonerations. Broadly, our findings suggest that prosecutors are more willing to revisit, assist and even investigate potentially wrongful convictions when the stakes are lower (e.g. the offense is less severe, there is no alleged official misconduct, the district attorney is well-established in the role, etc.). Given the wide range of prosecutorial responses to wrongful conviction claims, we emphasize the importance of specialized conviction review units to help routinize the practice of post-conviction review. Secondly, we suggest that district attorneys explicitly define professional performance metrics to include corrective measures such as assisting in the review of wrongful conviction claims. Finally, we encourage states to adopt formal legal regulations to guide prosecutorial behavior in response to post-conviction claims of innocence.

Domestic Violence – Can We Combat the Crime of Domestic Violence?

Domestic violence is put together by patterns of behaviors used in a desperate attempt to gain and maintain power and control over another human being within the context of a relationship, mostly a love and- or intimate relationship. From this perspective domestic violence does not discriminate, it can happen to anyone. Domestic violence is a huge global problem and affect people from all levels of society, socioeconomic, cultural, educational, emotional etc. Domestic violence is exercised both physically, sexually, materially, psychologically, latent and as counter abuse. Societal institutions like CPS (Child Protective Services) and prison represents to certain degree an unclearness due to the fact that they both exercise the implementation of sanctions, help and therapy. CPS and prisons strip people from their autonomy, the right to self-determination, work and children (indirectly, of course), they cooperate with district attorneys, prosecutors, prison and secret services – creating ambiguous roles who are difficult to handle. In this article I will attempt to describe what abuse is, its nature, how to recognize domestic violence and how we can meet people that experience domestic abuse. How can we help people that have been subjected to domestic violence from a collaborative approach? There are many interpretations on the subject of domestic violence, and I will by no means postulate that my version is an exhaustive one, it’s just one way at looking at the subject hoping that it will contribute to a greater awareness on the topic, and contribute to a more extensive development of skills enabling us to combat the crime of domestic violence, successfully.