The Political Responsiveness of Violent Crime Prosecution

Abstract

Is a federal prosecutor’s decision whether to pursue violent crime charges political? While prosecutors frequently assert their decision-making independence, their selection and operational constraints suggest a very different story. We assess whether political factors related to the prosecution priorities of the president, Congress, and the local public affect federal prosecutors’ decisions to pursue or decline charges in violent crime matters. To empirically examine this, we utilize data from 89 U.S. Attorneys offices from 1996 to 2011. The results provide rich new insight into when and why federal prosecutors’ decisions to pursue or decline prosecutions are driven by the preferences of the president, Congress, and the local public. The findings also have important broader implications for the role of political factors in a U.S. criminal justice system believed by many to be in crisis.

Descriptive Representation and Prosecutorial Discretion: Race, Sex, and Carceral Disparities

“…Two kinds of prosecutors govern American justice: U.S. Attorneys (USAs) prosecute federal criminal policy in specific geographic districts (e.g., Boldt & Boyd., 2018; Miller & Curry, 2018, Nelson & Ostrander, 2016), and county prosecutors , the focus of this paper, prosecute state law. In 2007, nearly 78,000 county attorneys (county chief prosecutors and their staff) closed 2.9 million felony cases (Perry and Banks 2011), while over 5,700 USAs (and another 5,600 full-time staff) closed just over 57,000 (Executive Office for United States Attorneys, 2007).…”

Equal justice under law? Prosecutor demographics and the death penalty

“…Greene (2018) used data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which collects its data through FOIA requests, to identify systematic expansion in federal prosecutions relating to immigration enforcement between 1986 and 2017. Boldt and Boyd (2018) used the U.S. Department of Justice's Legal Information Office Network System (LIONS) data to explore federal prosecutors’ charging and declination decisions related to the prosecution of violent crime from 1996 to 2011. Likewise, Gordon (2009) used both TRAC data and data compiled from other Department of Justice databases to model U.S. Attorneys’ decisions to prosecute public corruption cases.…”

“…See: https://www.justice.gov/usao/us-attorneys-listing.4 BothGordon (2009) andBoldt and Boyd (2018) discuss the challenges of compiling the U.S. Attorney data for analysis.5 This was confirmed by e-mail exchange with a senior staff member in the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics' Prosecution and Judicial Statistics Division.6 Many judicial and non-judicial nominees' questionnaires are available on the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary's website, available here: https:// www.judiciary.senate.gov/library?c-all-type-committee_questionnaire.…”

Political Context, White House Centralization, and the Timing of Presidential Nominations to the Federal Courts

“…First, we contribute to a growing literature on presidents' role in shaping the composition and activities of the judicial system. Scholarship in this area addresses the responsiveness of federal prosecutions to presidential priorities and partisanship (Boldt and Boyd 2018; Whitford and Yates 2003) and judicial responsiveness to presidential preferences (Black and Owens 2016). We extend the insights from this research to show how presidential politics affects how and when presidents choose to make nominations to lower courts.…”