Pubdate: Wed, 09 Jul 2014
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2014 The New York Times Company
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Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: James C. McKinley Jr.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/racial.htm (Racial Issues)

STUDY FINDS RACIAL DISPARITY IN CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS

Black and Hispanic defendants are more likely to be held in jail 
before trial and more likely to be offered plea bargains that include 
a prison sentence than whites and Asians charged with the same 
crimes, according to a two-year study of prosecutions handled by the 
Manhattan district attorney's office.

The study, by the Vera Institute of Justice, found that race was a 
significant factor at nearly every stage of criminal prosecutions in 
Manhattan, from setting bail to negotiating a plea deal to sentencing.

But race was not the sole factor, the study's authors said. A number 
of legal considerations were found to be more important in predicting 
a defendant's fate, among them the seriousness of the charge and the 
defendant's arrest record.

Nicholas Turner, the president of the institute, said researchers 
could not determine what caused the unequal treatment. "It could be 
implicit bias," he said. "It could also be race-neutral policies that 
end up having a particular disparate effect."

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said he was 
concerned that racial disparities had cropped up, especially in the 
areas of pretrial detention and sentencing. He promised to move 
forward with "implicit bias" training for his assistants to guard 
against unconscious prejudices in their decision-making.

"I'm glad to know the information," Mr. Vance said in an interview. 
"It's more important that we find out, ask the question and deal 
directly with what is uncovered, rather than failing to ask the 
question at all."

Funded by the Justice Department, the study grew out of Mr. Vance's 
campaign promise to determine whether race played a role in the 
decisions of prosecutors. In a rare move, his office opened its books 
to the institute's analysts for 2010 and 2011 and gave them unfettered access.

The study is one of the largest of its kind to be done in the United 
States, and its findings echoed what smaller studies had found in 
places like Milwaukee. The authors examined 222,542 resolved 
prosecutions over two years, scrutinizing data for all misdemeanors 
and a selection of felonies, including drug offenses.

The report comes at a time of heightened public debate across the 
nation about whether the criminal justice system treats people of 
different races equally. That debate drove the legal battle over the 
stop-and-frisk program in New York City and has prompted the United 
States attorney general to order an examination of federal 
convictions and sentencing guidelines.

"It is consistent with other studies," Don Stemen, an associate 
professor of criminology at Loyola University in Chicago, said. "Even 
when controlling for all these legal factors, race still has an impact."

One of the starkest disparities emerged in the prosecution of 
misdemeanor drug crimes like possession of marijuana or cocaine. The 
study found blacks were 27 percent more likely than whites to receive 
jail or prison time for misdemeanor drug offenses, while Hispanic 
defendants were 18 percent more likely to be incarcerated for those crimes.

The study's authors, Besiki Luka Kutateladze and Nancy R. Andiloro, 
looked at five key points in a criminal case when prosecutors have 
significant discretion. They examined the prosecutor's decisions 
about which cases to accept, which to dismiss, what to recommend at 
bail hearings, what plea bargains to offer and what sentences to recommend.

Race turned out to be a statistically significant factor at every 
stage, save the initial decision to accept cases, the study found.

Blacks were 10 percent more likely than whites to be remanded to jail 
before trial or to be unable to make bail. Asians fared even better 
than whites when it came to remaining free before trial: 24 percent 
of white defendants were detained, but only 14 percent of Asians were held.

Prosecutors were also found to be more likely to offer black and 
Hispanic defendants plea deals on misdemeanors that included jail 
time. Forty percent of black defendants and 36 percent of Hispanic 
defendants were offered plea deals involving incarceration, rather 
than probation or community service. That ratio for whites was 33 
percent, and for Asians, 17 percent.

At sentencing, blacks were also found to be slightly more likely to 
be sentenced to jail than whites and Latinos, with Asians 
significantly less likely to receive jail terms.

Seymour W. James Jr., the attorney in chief at the Legal Aid Society, 
said the study "really confirms what we have been seeing for years" 
in bail hearings and sentencing. He said prosecutors should receive 
extensive training on how to counteract what he perceived might be 
their own unconscious prejudices.

The study's authors noted policy decisions may cause some of the 
inequalities. The office's guidelines for plea offers on 
misdemeanors, for instance, requires harsher offers for defendants 
with an arrest history. That works against defendants from heavily 
policed neighborhoods.

Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil 
Liberties Union, said the study raised troubling questions about the 
police policy in New York of making many arrests for minor offenses 
in high-crime neighborhoods, under the so-called broken windows 
theory. That policy has resulted in many black and Hispanic city 
residents with long arrest records, making it harder for them to make 
bail and receive a non-jail sentence, she said.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a historian and director of the Schomburg 
Center for Research in Black Culture, said the racial disparities 
"were not as bad as one might presume," given the predominately black 
and Hispanic makeup of the state prison population. The pipeline, he 
said, begins with the police decisions on who to arrest: about 
178,000 of the 222,000 defendants in the study were black or Hispanic.

"It looks like the issue for Manhattan may be less one of what the 
prosecutors are doing over all, and more one of what police officers 
are doing," he said.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom