1 The study was financed by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, the state funding branch of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration of the U.S. Department of Justice.Google Scholar

2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981?).Google Scholar

3 For the country as a whole, the average percentage for felony prosecutions reaching trial is closer to 10 percent.Google Scholar

4 (Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Foundation, 1922).Google Scholar

5 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (George W. Wickersham, chairman), Reports, Nos. 1–13, in 7 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1931).Google Scholar

6 Wayne R. LaFave, Arrest: The Decision to Take a Suspect into Custody (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1965); Donald W. Newman, Conviction: The Determination of Guilt or Innocence Without Trial (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1966); Lawrence P. Tiffany, Donald M. McIntyre, & Daniel Rotenberg, Detection of Crime: Stopping and Questioning; Search and Seizure; Encouragement and Entrapment (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1967); Frank W. Miller, Prosecution: The Decision to Charge a Suspect with a Crime (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969); and Robert O. Dawson, Sentencing: The Decision as to Type, Length, and Conditions of Sentence (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969).Google Scholar

7 For a description of the index crime categories see U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports for the United States, 1977, at 1–5, 304–5 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978), or U.S. Department of Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, National Criminal Justice Information and Statistics Service, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1978, at 750–53 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1979).Google Scholar

8 Congress, in its doubtful wisdom, has now ordered the inclusion of arson in the group of index crimes.Google Scholar

9 Philadelphia is omitted because the reliability of the data reported by that police department is suspect. See Hans Zeisel & Ellen Fredel, The Secret of the Philadelphia Police, paper read before the 1978 meeting of the American Statistical Association (prepared for publication).Google Scholar

10 U.S. Office of Law Enforcement Assistance, Criminal Victimization in the United States: A Report of a National Survey, by Philip H. Ennis (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, May 1967).Google Scholar

11 U.S. Department of Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Criminal Justice Information and Statistics Service, Criminal Victimization Surveys in the Nation's Five Largest Cities: National Crime Panel Surveys: Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, April 1975).Google Scholar

12 The victimization surveys cover the resident population; the crime statistics include also crimes against commuters and transients. Victimization surveys ask for the respondent's recall over a time period; crimes committed shortly before the beginning of that period are often reported as having fallen within the period. And crime victims, especially in the lower socioeconomic strata, are generally difficult to locate for survey purposes. Even the U.S. Bureau of the Census has encountered these difficulties.Google Scholar

13 “The surveys … were carried out during the first quarter of 1973 and covered criminal acts that took place during the 12-month period prior to the month of the interview, a time frame roughly comparable to the calendar year 1972.” See report cited in note 11 supra, at iii.Google Scholar

14 For obvious reasons, homicide is not one of the crimes covered by a survey that interviews victims.Google Scholar

15 There are serious problems about considering arrests that did not end in conviction as part of a criminal record.Google Scholar

16 Unpublished data from the Institute for Law and Social Research (inslaw) in Washington, D.C. See also Brian Forst, Judith Lucianovic, & Sarah J. Cox, What Happens After Arrest? A Court Perspective of Police Operations in the District of Columbia, promis Research Project Publication no. 4, at 9–10 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Law and Social Research, 1977).Google Scholar

17 Hindelang, Michael J., Race and Involvement in Common Law Personal Crimes, 43 Am. Soc. Rev. 93 (1978).Google Scholar

18 The custody was meant for at least one year or more but in fact ended much earlier. This disposition was abolished in 1975.Google Scholar

19 Peter W. Greenwood and Marvin Lavin reported a similar finding from California: “The likelihood of conviction is not significantly affected by the arrestee's prior record, although those with less serious records are more likely to be released without formal court proceedings.” (The Disposition of Felony Arrests: Prosecuting and Sentencing Policies in California and Their Effects on Crime. Rand Publication 10061–1-DOJ mimeographed, 1977, at 59.).Google Scholar

20 See table 1 and accompanying text supra.Google Scholar

21 It must be remembered that in this study we did not talk to the complaining witnesses.Google Scholar

22 Frank J. Cannavale, Jr., & William D. Falcon, eds., Witness Cooperation: With a Handbook of Witness Management (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath & Co., Lexington Books, 1976).Google Scholar

23 I know of a case (not connected with this study) in which a woman in New York who had been robbed of her purse by some juveniles was urged by their families and social workers to drop the complaint.Google Scholar

24 The New York Post (Sept. 15, 1974) reported that in the Queens Criminal Court robbery charges against two youths were dismissed when the restaurant's night manager and waitress failed to appear. Shortly after the two suspects were arrested, an unidentified teen-ager had entered the restaurant and told the manager: “I hear that you are supposed to go to court. I don't think it would be a good idea for you to show up.”.Google Scholar

25 See table 1 supra.Google Scholar

26 We did not sample the frequency of this event but others have done so. See Feeney, Floyd F. & Woods, James R., A Comparative Description of New York and California Criminal Justice Systems: Arrest Through Arraignment, 26 Vand. L. Rev. 973 (1973).Google Scholar

27 See fig. 9 supra.Google Scholar

28 See Zeisel, Hans, Bail Revisited, 1979 A.B.F. Res. J. 769, at fig. 1 and accompanying text.Google Scholar

29 Of the 2.3 percent of cases disposed of through trial, 1.5 percent ended in acquittal, 0.8 percent in conviction.Google Scholar

30 See fig. 22 infra. Since one cannot exclude the possibility that occasionally our inquiries may have missed weaknesses which the prosecutor saw, the figure could be slightly on the high side.Google Scholar

31 In principle, also a reduction to a lesser felony gives some information on a reduced upper sentence limit; but since felony sentences hardly ever reach the upper limit, little information is in fact conveyed by the mere reduction of the felony class, unless a “sentence tariff” prevails and is known to counsel.Google Scholar

32 See table 1 supra.Google Scholar

33 Another consideration is the cost of going to trial, although there may be some problem as to whose cost interests will prevail in the frequently occurring case involving an indigent defendant.Google Scholar

34 There is a potential method, albeit an indirect one, of estimating the differential between the sentence after guilty plea and after trial for a general sample of cases, not only for those that go to trial. One would have to ask experienced lawyers, prosecutors, and judges what they would estimate the sentence to be if the case had gone to trial. A tentative effort we made in that direction failed. The defense lawyers tended to overstate the size of the differential in order to magnify their achievement; prosecutor and judge had the opposite tendency because too large a differential seemed difficult to justify. A better way of obtaining a realistic estimate of the sentence after trial would be to ask the question with respect to a particular case, but not of the immediate participants in the case and not by comparing it with the sentence after guilty plea. Prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges should be asked: “If in this case the jury would find the defendant guilty—what sentence would he get?”.Google Scholar

35 The proportion of defendants reaching trial in the 400 sample was 6 percent; in the 2000 sample, it was 2 percent.Google Scholar