The Politics of Justice: Prosecutor Incentives and Sexual Violence Prosecution

• In Event: Poster Session: Judicial Politics & Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Judicial Politics

Abstract

Recent literature has suggested U.S. chief prosecutors inappropriately decline to prosecute a substantial portion of reported sexual violence cases. Historically, this low prosecution of sexual violence cases has been attributed to the difficult-to-prosecute nature of these cases. Contrary to this notion, I find substantial variation in the rate at which sexual violence cases are prosecuted across different chief prosecutor jurisdictions. This substantial variation suggests the difficult-to-prosecute nature of sexual violence cases alone is insufficient for explaining the low prosecution rate of sexual violence cases. In this paper, I seek to explain this variation in case handling by leveraging plausibly exogenous shocks to the incentives of chief prosecutors. To do so, I combine several key sources of data, including case handling data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Incident-Based Reporting System and chief prosecutor election data from the University of North Carolina’s Prosecutors and Politics Project. Despite their substantial power in the U.S. justice system, chief prosecutors are rarely studied in academic literature. Though the majority of chief prosecutors are democratically elected, literature even more rarely treats them as political, rather than solely legal, actors. In this paper I seek to fill this gap by 1) identifying several incentives of chief prosecutors that may explain the variation in sexual violence case handling and 2) testing whether or not shocks to these incentives cause shifts in sexual violence case handling. I argue that chief prosecutors are motivated by a combination of internal office incentives and the desire to secure re-election. Qualitative research suggests internal office incentives generally reward chief prosecutors for achieving high conviction rates and long sentences. However, chief prosecutors may hold different views about the winnability of certain cases based on their perceptions of public/jury preferences. Thus, I first explore whether events that increase the salience of sexual violence cases, such as Me Too movement events and locally salient cases, increase sexual violence prosecution. Secondly, chief prosecutors may vary in the extent to which they believe voters vote based on sexual violence prosecutions. If chief prosecutors are responsive to perceived voter preferences, I would expect events that increase the salience of sexual violence cases to increase sexual violence prosecution in a manner consistent with election cycles and pressures. Lastly, certain legal factors vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, such as evidence laws and legal definitions of rape. These factors presumably alter the winnability of certain cases. To examine this possibility, I leverage difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity designs to test whether changes in legal factors affect sexual violence case handling. Though legal actors often appeal to higher notions of justice when explaining their decisions, emerging evidence makes clear that, like other actors, their decisions are also influenced by political institutions and incentives.

Author

• Madison Dalton, Stanford University