Disposition of Felony Arrests - A Sequential Analysis of the Judicial Decision Making Progress

• NCJ Number: 81077
• Author(s): H Chen
• Date Published: 1981
• Length: 184 pages
• Sale Source: UMI Dissertation Services; Not Available Through National Institute of Justice/NCJRS Document Loan Program
• Publication Type: Thesis/Dissertation
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: *This document is currently unavailable from NCJRS. University of Massachusetts - doctoral dissertation

Annotation

The study assesses how prosecutors and judges make decisions about the disposition of felony arrests in court proceedings from initial screening to final sentencing.

Abstract

An organizational perspective is used to outline the structure and processes of the court, thus providing a theoretical model for case disposition. The study sample consists of more than 150,000 cases drawn from the Los Angeles district attorney's Prosecutor's Management Information System file containing all arrests from 1975 to 1979. A case-filtering model which explains the judicial decisions made in the initial screening, preliminary hearing, and arraignment argues that the prosecutor and judge sort out cases with low utility value in terms of crime seriousness and convictability. The model of the defendant's choice between trial or guilty plea hypothesizes that a settlement of plea bargaining depends on the congruence of the prosecutor's maximum charge or sentence concession and the defendant's minimum charge or sentence concession. The trial is defined as a function of variables related to convictability, crime seriousness, court procedure, and defendant's characteristics. According to the sentencing model, judges' sentencing decisions maximize the sentence utility determined by the defendant's potential dangerousness and the seriousness of the crime committed. Most of the functional forms of the models are specified as multiplicative. A logistic approach is used for binary dependent variables (e.g., prison versus non-prison sentence), while a log-transformation regression is used to analyze continuous dependent variables (e.g., sentence length). Results indicate that the theoretical models are accurate. Data from social and demographic variables included in equations to check whether or not the courts discriminate against disadvantaged groups such as blacks and females show that disadvantaged groups actually receive much more lenient dispositions than advantaged groups. The findings of favorable disposition of minority group-cases at the case-filtering and trial stage suggest that police officers make differential arrests in terms of convictability across race groups and that conflict/labeling perspectives may be more accurate in explaining officers' arrests than judges' disposition of cases. Extensive tables, figures, and a bibliography are included.