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Race and Prosecutorial Discretion in Homicide Cases

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Michael L. Radelet  and
Glenn L. Pierce
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Abstract

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This paper examines the cases of 1017 homicide defendants in Florida. Two main data sources are used: the police department's classification of the case, as found in the FBI's Supplemental Homicide Reports, and the prosecutor's classification, as determined by court records. Each data set characterizes the homicide as involving felonious circumstances, possible felonious circumstances, or nonfelonious circumstances. Attention is focused on cases that differ in their police and prosecutorial classifications. Results indicate that differences in these classifications are related to defendant's and victim's race, with blacks accused of killing whites the most likely to be “upgraded” and the least likely to be “downgraded.” The process of upgrading is then shown to significantly increase the likelihood of the imposition of a death sentence in cases with white victims where no plea bargain is offered.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , 1985 , pp. 587 - 621
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

*

This research was supported in part by grants from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. and the Chicago Resource Center. We would like to thank Kay Isaly for her assistance in overseeing the data collection, Margaret Vandiver for her assistance in preparing the data for analysis, Alan Agresti and Jane Pendergast for their statistical advice, and William J. Bowers, Samuel R. Gross, Hugo Adam Bedau, Colin Loftin, Daniel Givelber, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. We are especially indebted to Professor Richard O. Lempert for his many hours of extraordinary editorial work with the paper.

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