Legality and Reality: Some Evidence on Criminal Procedure (original) (raw)

Essays in the Economics of Crime and Punishment

Journal of Economic Issues, 1977

In the folklore of criminal justice a popular belief is that the accused will have his case decided in a trial. Empirical evidence does not support this belief. Table 1 indicates that most cases are disposed of before trial by either a guilty plea or a dismissal of the charges. What factors determine the choice between a pretrial settlement and a trial? What accounts for the large proportion of settlements compared to trials? How are certain aspects of the criminal justice process such as the bail system and court delay related to the decision to settle or to go to trial? The main

An Economic Analysis of the Courts

The Journal of Law and Economics, 1971

A Structural Examination of Misdemeanor Court Disposition Patterns*

Criminology, 1993

The utility of structural criminology in explaining societal reaction to criminal events is examined in an analysis of misdemeanor court cases processed in an urban southern jurisdiction. The analysis employs a relational measure of class to discern distinctions in disposition patterns for misdemeanors classifid by type of complaining party. Logistic regression is used to consider the influence of a variety ofprocedural/legal and extralegal variables in predicting case dispositions for individual, corporate, and victimless cases. Results indicate partial support for the premises of structural theory, and the discussion focuses on how the context of criminal court processing may be conditioned by vatying degrees of control between victim and offender.

The Bail System: An Economic Approach

The Journal of Legal Studies, 1973

Widespread dissatisfaction with the current state of criminal justice in the United States has revived interest in the long-standing problem of determining what to do with a person charged with a crime between the time of his arrest and trial.' Should the accused be released or detained during this time interval? What factors are relevant to this decision? What requirements, if any, should be imposed on the accused as a condition of his release? The fundamental issue these questions raise is the difficulty of reconciling the defendant's rights to freedom before his guilt has been formally adjudicated with the community's interest in protecting itself from possible future harm.2 In practice, most societies try to

Crime, prosecutors, and the certainty of conviction

European Journal of Law and Economics, 2013

This paper tests predictions of a structural, augmented supply-of-offenders model regarding the relative effects of police, public prosecution and courts, respectively, on crime. Using detailed data on the different stages of the criminal prosecution process in Germany, empirical evidence suggests that public prosecutors and their influence on the probability of conviction play a major role in explaining the variation of crime rates, while the impact of the severity of punishment is small and insignificant.

Adversarial and Nonadversarial Justice: A Comparison of Guilty Pleas and Trials*

Criminology, 1985

Despite the frequency of guilty pleas, researchers disagree about the ability of plea bargaining to provide justice. Critics argue that plea bargaining deprives defendants of due process rights and procedural safeguards Proponents argue that guilty pleas save resources for cases that require trial and allow oft'cials flexibility to tailor justice to individual defendants. This article explores these issues by examining the eflect of defendant and case characteristics on sentence severity for 3,269 male robbery and burglary defendants who either pled guilty or were tried in six US. jurisdictions, three of which had recently attempted to eliminate or greatly reduce plea bargaining and three with few restrictions on plea bargaining. The results conjirm some criticisms of plea bargaining, but refute others. More criminally experienced defendants and defendants who pled guilty at the earliest opportunity did not receive sentencing leniency. Moreover, to a large extent, the same variables predict sentence severity for guilty pleas and trials. In contrast, the results show that defendants convicted at trial received more severe sanctions than defendants who pled guilty, controlling for case severity, evidence, and ofender characteristics The results also suggest that the jurisdictions which attempted to control plea bargaining through more centralized control of assistance succeeded in tightening the $t between case characteristics and sentences for both cases aa'judicated by guilty plea and trial. Although guilty pleas account for 80% to 90% of all felonies adjudicated in the United States, criminal justice experts disagree about whether widespread reliance on plea negotiation represents a threat to the administration of justice.

Criminality and Social Interaction

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Taking into account the scope of the factors, which may have influence over crime, is not most reasonable strategy to approach this point under a restricted view. The approach which gives us the support on this research, parts from the foundation that crimes have diverse nature, not only for its type but, primarily on its determinants. Therefore, there should be a demarcation line which limits these different categories of crimes, when it is regarding to the nature of the motivation for committing a crime. Such motivation may be associated to economic factors or social interaction.

Legality and Reality: Some Evidence on Criminal Procedure (original) (raw)

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