As far as I understand it, trials that go to verdict are only a tiny proportion of all prosecutions. When the evidence is solid the accused will usually plead guilty. If the evidence is shaky, then the case will usually be dismissed. My questions:
What proportion of prosecutions actually go to a jury verdict?
What proportion of verdicts are guilty /not guilty?
You may restrict your answer to specific types of crime, or specific locations.
In New York City:
Staten Island has the highest conviction rate: 93.9 percent
Queens- 92.5 percent rate.
Manhattan- 90.3 percent conviction rate
the Bronx - 88.7 percent rate
Brooklyn - 82.6 percent rate
the special narcotics prosecutor - 81.1 percent rate.
Staten Island had 423 cases go to trial, 397 ended with a conviction.
In Manhattan, they have about 100,000 criminal cases per year
http://manhattanda.org/officeoverview/
My understanding is that in Manhattan about 2% of criminal cases go to trial, around 2,000.
However, note that if the Defense (or even the Prosecution) brings in some pretty damn good exculpatory evidence that was not available at the start of the trial, either side can move to dismiss even fairly late in the trial.
This is only true when there is some sentencing advantage to pleading guilty, which is often the case but not always.
Not at all. Lots of people plead because they can’t deal with the stress and uncertainty of a trial, or because they can’t miss that much work, or for lots of reasons. Anyway, in NYC, 98% of people charged with a crime find some merit in pleading.
Any further information on this?
I was really talking about felonies. Most people who plead guilty to a felony aren’t doing it because they’ve missed too much work. I wasn’t addressing New York specifically, but pointing out that this varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, so repeating your statistics like that doesn’t change anything. Some judges will go easier on someone for pleading guilty even without a deal in place, but that depends on the local culture. Another reason might be if someone doesn’t want to pay an attorney for a lengthy trial, but the point of the matter is that pleading guilty doesn’t mean that the evidence was airtight, and pleading not guilty doesn’t mean that it wasn’t!
A lot of drug convictions are felonies so I would say there are a sizable number of people that do need to plea bargain to guilty because of drugs, due to jobs and children.
Also a flat lot of people are just too “stupid” to understand what pleading guilty means in the long run, in terms of future jobs, getting government benefits and even voting.
One should expect a very high conviction rate of cases that go to trial simply because prosecutors would not go ahead unless they are fairly certain they’d get a conviction. You only are gonna get one shot so if there isn’t a decent chance, it’s better to hold off and keep the case open.
Here in NSW Australia most criminal cases are heard in the District Court, the middle level of the system. The Court deals with all criminal offences except murder, treason and piracy. Here is a link to the Deputy Senior Public Defender discussing sentencing.
He says:* A vast majority (perhaps 85%) of criminal cases in the District Court end up being pleas of guilty to something. Of the matters that go to trial, generally the acquittal rate is about 50%.*
That figure is pretty good Australia wide, but there are huge problems with counting these things. Suppose the charge is murder, the accused pleads not guilty but gets convicted of manslaughter. Is that counted as a “win”? What if he offered to plead guilty to manslaughter before trial but the prosecution didn’t accept? Suppose he goes to trial on 15 counts of burglary, but gets convicted on 13 - is that a win? Is a conviction on 1 a win? You see the problem in defining terms, here.
It is difficult to know why there is a 50% success rate for trials generally. In my jurisdiction, the conviction rate for murder is far higher, but since there is a mandatory life sentence (again, in my jurisdiction - not all) almost no-one pleads guilty because the sentence can’t be reduced if you do. In addition, murders are always far better investigated and prosecuted.
My guess is that the 50% rate reflects the collective instinctive sense that the Bar has about when it is worth taking something to trial as opposed to pleading guilty. That is, if the evidence looks like you’ve got at least a 50-50 chance, advise the client to go to trial. Otherwise, the sentence discounts you get for pleading make the Game Theory calculation favour the plea of guilty. And doing that calculation seems to result in about 85% of cases thinking they’d best drop the tweeds.
That said, I suspect it is impossible to have any confidence that the conviction rate is stable across offences. Drug offences almost always involve open and shut cases - the police have tapes and undercover officers, phone taps and so on. And the people involved treat getting pinched as a cost of business - they take purely pragmatic decisions about pleading.
Child sexual offences, on the other hand, tend to have a much higher rate of not guilty pleas. This is because of the massive stigma of a conviction (they will have vehemently denied guilt to their families and friends, and can’t back down from that), and because the evidence tends to be, in general, much weaker.
As covered above, guilty/ not guilty rates depend on jurisdiction and the policies followed. It also depends on whatever body decides on going for trial. In some juridictions prosecutors almost never go for trial until they are damn certain that they will get a conviction, so that will mean a much higher conviction rate, in others they allow cases which are iffy, so you have a far lower conviction rate.
Some times it can get ridiculous. Due to politics, a large proportion of rape/sexual assualt cases go to trial in England and Wales, resulting in a conviction rate of slightly over5%