Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Theorizing Failed Prosecutions, Jon B. Gould, Victoria M. Smiegocki, Richard A. Leo

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Over the last twenty years, the scholarly field of erroneous convictions has skyrocketed, with multiple articles and books exploring the failures that convict the innocent. However, there has been comparatively little attention to the other side of the coin, failed prosecutions, when the criminal justice system falls short in convicting the likely perpetrator. In this Article, we take up an analysis of failed prosecutions, simultaneously seeking to define its breadth and explain its relation to erroneous convictions. We explore potential hypotheses for the existence of failed prosecutions and then compare those theories to a set of failed prosecutions compiled from …