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The Charging And Sentencing Effects Of Depth And Distance In A Criminal Code, Ronald F. Wright, Rod Engen

Ronald F. Wright

Today's conventional wisdom about criminal justice in the United States tells us that criminal codes do not matter much. The real impact of the criminal law appears not in the statute books but in the choices of criminal prosecutors who apply those laws. Moreover, decision-making by prosecutors takes on even greater importance in the context of late twentieth century reforms that have made sentencing more determinate and less discretionary. Scholars have argued that these legal changes have effectively increased prosecutorial influence over sentences.

Despite these claims, little is known about the actual use of prosecutorial discretion under these kinds of …

The Power Of Bureaucracy In The Response To Blakely And Booker, Ronald F. Wright

Ronald F. Wright

How will different jurisdictions respond to the recent Supreme Court decisions in Blakely v. Washington and United States v. Booker, which require jury fact-finding to support certain types of sentences? The best clues in predicting the answer to this question come from the people who know this world best, the sentencing bureaucracy. Sentencing commissions, mostly for benign reasons, hope to preserve their own place in the sentencing structure, or to expand their role if possible. The particulars shift from place to place, but this powerful tendency of bureaucracies for self-preservation offers a reliable way to predict the reactions of sentencing …

Does Religion Really Reduce Crime?, Paul Heaton

Paul Heaton

Considerable research in sociology, criminology, and economics aims to understand the effect of religiosity on crime. Many sociological theories positing a deterrent effect of religion on crime are empirically examined using ordinary least-squares (OLS) regressions of crime measures on measures of religiosity. Most previous studies have found a negative effect of religion on crime using OLS, a result I am able to replicate using county-level data on religious membership and crime rates. If crime affects religious participation, however, OLS coefficients in this context suffer from endogeneity bias. Using historic religiosity as an instrument for current religious participation, I find a …

The Political Economy Of Up-Front Fees For Indigent Criminal Defense, Ronald F. Wright, Wayne A. Logan

Ronald F. Wright

In this article, we trace the origin and spread of state laws designed to make indigent criminal defendants pay, up-front, a portion of the costs of their state-appointed counsel. These co-pays, which can range from $10 to over $200, are part of the increasingly popular pay-as-you-go movement, requiring criminal defendants to defray the system costs of their prosecution and punishment.

On their face, such laws would appear to be a natural target of vigorous resistance by the defense bar. This turns out to be only half true, however, for it is often the leaders of public defense organizations, faced with …