Determinants and Consequences of the 'Priority' of a Case for Prosecution (From Prosecutorial Decisionmaking - Selected Readings, P 93-106, 1980, Joan E Jacoby, ed. - See NCJ-79210)

• NCJ Number: 79215
• Author(s): S H Turner
• Date Published: 1980
• Length: 13 pages
• Grant Number(s): 78-NI-AX-0006
• Sponsoring Agency: US Dept of Justice
• Corporate Author: Bureau of Social Science Research, Inc
• Sale Source: National Institute of Justice/
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: A paper presented to the American Society of Criminology's 1979 Meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 7-9, 1979. Available on microfiche as NCJ-79210.

Annotation

The determinants and consequences of the priority of a case for prosecution are discussed.

Abstract

The priority of a case for prosecution has been found to rest upon (1) the seriousness of the offense for which the suspect was arrested, (2) the extent and nature of the defendant's prior record, and (3) the strength of the evidence. Offense severity can be measured by the Sellin/Wolfgang scale, which generates a number thought to be proportional to the seriousness of any criminal offense. While there is no adequate measure of the seriousness of a defendant's prior record, the stopgap measure used was a scale created by Don Gottfredson and associates (Base Expectancy), which is designed to measure the likelihood of an offender's return to prison. The measurement of the strength of evidence was also unsatisfactory. It involved a prosecutor giving a subjective estimate of whether the evidence was strong enough to win the case. The measure of priority itself was developed from the fields of psychophysics and contemporary criminology by deriving objective magnitudes from subjective magnitudes. The overall subjective judgments of prosecutors became the dependent variable from which dependent variables were derived using scaling techniques. About 70 percent of the variance in judgments about the priority of cases was accounted for by the three variables proposed. The approach recommended for determining the priority of a case for prosecution appears both accurate and practical because the variables are tamper-proof; data acquisition time is short; and the cost of obtaining the required data is low. Further, the measures contain elements common to all jurisdictions and are relevant to the generally accepted role of the prosecutor. Tabular data are provided.