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Prosecutorial Discretion and Plea Bargaining in Federal Criminal Courts in the United States, 1983-1990

Metadata Updated: November 28, 2023

The primary purpose of this data collection was to study whether prosecutorial behavior was affected by the implementation of federal criminal sentencing guidelines in 1987. Monthly time series data were constructed on a number of prosecutorial outcomes, representing either discrete decision steps in the processing of criminal cases or the characteristics of cases that passed through the system. Variables include disposition year and month, number of matters initiated, number of cases filed, declined, and dismissed, number of convictions by trial, by jury, and by bench trial, number of guilty pleas, ratio of guilty pleas to cases resolved, and ratio of trials to cases resolved. The collection also provides a series of dichotomous variables to assess the impact of various events on prosecutorial outcomes over time. These events include the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 (effective November 1986), implementation of the sentencing guidelines (November 1987), Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 (November 1988), United States Supreme Court's decision in the Minstretta case affirming the constitutionality of the sentencing guidelines (January 1989), and Attorney General Thornburgh's memo outlining Justice Department policy on charging and prosecution (March 1989).

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: us-pd

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
Metadata Updated Date November 28, 2023

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOJ JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
Metadata Updated Date November 28, 2023
Publisher Bureau of Justice Statistics
Maintainer
Identifier 2200
Data First Published 1993-04-09T00:00:00
Language eng
Data Last Modified 2000-06-05T00:00:00
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 011:21
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://www.justice.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id fb254e69-7b70-40c4-9846-7783c3d84cf4
Harvest Source Id 3290e90a-116f-42fc-86ac-e65521ef3b68
Harvest Source Title DOJ JSON
License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Program Code 011:061
Publisher Hierarchy Office of Justice Programs > Bureau of Justice Statistics
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash eb6c3b4deb7cbaf5222896971df3a78d778ab4d18ed5bc914133cb6aa80a496b
Source Schema Version 1.1

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