Past Resources of the Week
ROTW: Race and Prosecution in Manhattan
Monday, July 14, 2014
- The Vera Institute
- Link: http://www.vera.org
The Vera Institute partnered with the District Attorney of New York on an NIJ-funded study examining racial and ethnic disparities in criminal case outcomes in Manhattan. The two-year study, which analyzed more than 200,000 cases, focused on the role of prosecutors during several points of a criminal case—case acceptance for prosecution, dismissals, pretrial detention, plea bargaining, and sentencing recommendations—and whether prosecutorial discretion contributes to racially and ethnically disparate outcomes. While the best predictors of case outcomes were factors that directly pertained to legal aspects of a case, the research also found that race remained a factor in case outcomes.