Three papers on the effects of criminal procedure on the exercise of discretion in the criminal justice system

This dissertation examines how three systems of criminal procedure shape the exercise of discretion in the criminal justice system. Chapter 1 considers the relationship between sentencing guidelines and judicial sentencing decisions. Using simulation modeling, it challenges a widely held belief that robust sentencing guidelines increase uniformity in sentencing at the cost of fairness. Chapter 2 turns to police regulation. Police departments and policymakers have implemented a range of mechanisms to regulate police discretion, but much of the scholarly literature has expressed skepticism about their effectiveness. One regulatory approach has largely escaped scrutiny—prosecutorial screening. This study examines the effect of prosecutorial screening on police charge decisions in one major metropolitan city in the United States. Exploiting the fact that the screening program only applies to suspects over seventeen years of age, it compares suspects arrested just a few weeks before and a few weeks after their seventeenth birthday. The analysis reveals a drop in felony charges against suspects arrested just after the age boundary for crimes subject to prosecutorial screening. The same pattern is not observed for crimes not subject to screening, suggesting that officers file lesser charges against suspects over seventeen years of age in anticipation of the stringent screening process. Chapter 3 explores the role of discovery rights on the plea bargaining process. It begins by extending prior work on civil discovery to develop a theory of criminal discovery. It then conducts the first systematic empirical investigation of the effects of expanding criminal discovery on case outcomes in one state that recently enacted legislation granting defendants wider discovery rights. A series of difference-in-differences models comparing felony and misdemeanor courts provide little evidence that the law promoted judicial efficiency by reducing the trial rate or that it produced more favorable outcomes for defendants by increasing the dismissal rate