The Flow of Murder Cases Through the Criminal Justice System in a Brazilian City

Abstract

<jats:p> The flow of homicide cases in Brazil can be described as a funnel, as numerous events are reported to the police but only a few are convicted. This article aims to identify the variables influencing time to clearance and time to conviction for murder cases in Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais) by examining a sample of police investigations (uncleared cases) and criminal proceedings (cleared cases) closed between 2003 and 2013. Using Cox proportional hazard model, we found that time to clearance is affected by crime attributes and police procedures although time to conviction is affected only by arrest in flagrante delicto. </jats:p>

From detection to sentencing: a homicide case flow analysis of the Dutch criminal justice system

“…This theory has been extended from individual factors to neighbourhood and group factors, arguing that depending on their socio-demographic constellations, neighbourhoods can receive more or less 'law' (Borg and Parker 2001). Based on Black's (1976) framework, homicides involving old, male, ethnic majority victims in affluent areas are more likely to make it through the entire funnel, whilst homicides involving young, female, ethnic minority victims are more likely to remain unsolved, be associated with lower conviction rates, and lower sentences (Baumer et al 2000, Regoeczi and Jarvis 2013, Pastia et al 2017, Ribeiro and Diniz 2020. On the other side of the spectrum, Gottfredson and Hindelang (1979) hold that non-discretional factors determine the likelihood of homicide cases to drop out of the process.…”

“…In terms of empirical research, prior work has mostly focused on the likelihood of a case to proceed to just the next stage in the funnel (Addington 2007), the most studied stage involving homicide clearance (e.g. Borg and Parker 2001, Puckett and Lundman 2003, Rydberg and Pizarro 2014, Pastia et al 2017, Petersen 2017, Braga et al 2018, Ribeiro and Diniz 2020, i.e. a homicide being solved with the arrest or identification of a suspect (Liem et al 2018).…”

“…To a lesser extent, studies have examined later stages of the criminal justice funnel, including homicide prosecution practices (Bertz 1994, Cerulli 2004, Baumer and Martin 2013, Pizarro et al 2020) and homicide sentencing (Gross and Mauro 1984, Glaeser and Sacerdote 2003, Auerhahn 2007, Johnson et al 2010, Baumer and Martin 2013, Petersen 2017. Further, in this relatively young research tradition, studies have mostly focused on factors determining the likelihood of cases proceeding to the next step in the funnel (for an overview, see and with few exceptions (Sturup et al 2015, Granath and Sturup 2018, Brookman et al 2020, Ribeiro and Diniz 2020, the vast majority of studies have relied on US data. The focus on the US system is problematic because one may question to what extent US legal practices, as well as US-specific factors such as race, prevalence of firearmperpetrated homicides, gang membership, an adversarial criminal justice system andin terms of sentencingcapital punishment, apply to criminal justice practices in other parts of the world.…”

“…In spite of a recent surge in empirical studies using smaller samples or populations (e.g. Brookman et al 2020, Ribeiro andDiniz 2020), so far, to the best of our knowledge, only one empirical study has been able to capture the entire flow of homicide cases through the system, based on three hundred firearm-homicide incidents in East Tennessee (Bertz 1994; for an overview, see . Previous studies that have tried to map entire criminal justice flows have focused on non-lethal crimes instead, including rape (LaFree 1989) or child sexual abuse cases (Cheit andGoldschmidt 1997, Cross et al 2003).…”

“…We therefore do not investigate a country with an extremely high homicide rate that could affect and be affected by the effectiveness of the criminal justice system. To put these figures in perspective, recent work on the homicide flow in Brazil, by Ribeiro and Diniz (2020) showed a homicide rate of 27 per 100,000with clearance rates of about 15 per cent (Sapori 2007).…”