Suchergebnisse

This response to a comment by John L. Washburn (2007), "On Some Aspects of Prosecutorial Discretion in the International Criminal Court," on Ohlin's (2007) "On the Very Idea of Transitional Justice" contends that Washburn misinterpreted what Ohlin said regarding the Rome Statute. Ohlin maintains his position that the ICC prosecutor has no such discretion & offers a fuller explanation of his argument. He notes that determination of this issue will have to wait at least until the ICC issues its first decisions, & perhaps longer. Adapted from the source document.

This article explores the topic of sentencing guidelines. Specifically, the author weighs the intended role of such guidelines against their role in actuality, noting the discrepancy between the two. The article concludes that it is up to the values and skill of those who implement the sentencing guidelines for their proper manifestation in the legislative process.

Discussion of prosecution reform is haunted by anachronistic conceptions of judgment and organization. These conceptions see professional judgment as inherently individual and ineffable and professional organization as inherently informal and opaque. The appeal of these conceptions is due in part to the assumption that the only alternative to the judgment and organization they prescribe is bureaucracy. In fact, post-bureaucratic forms of organization have become dominant in recent decades in several professions. They key elements of postbureaucratic organization are presumptive rules, root cause analysis, peer review, and performance measurement. Each of these elements can be found in recent reforms in prosecution, but the field, like the legal profession generally, lags other occupations. Although post-bureaucratic reforms are sometimes resisted as inconsistent with democracy, they are better understood as democracy-reinforcing.

Abstract
This article contributes to our understanding of the role of gender in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. We use administrative data from a prosecutor's office in a large urban county to estimate the direct and interactive effects of defendant and prosecutor gender on accepting initial charges brought by law enforcement officials. After implementing coarsened exact matching, Probit regression results suggest that prosecutors, on average, are more likely to accept charges against male defendants. In scenarios where gender is salient to decision making (i.e., in domestic violence and sexual assault cases), we find mixed evidence regarding whether female prosecutors make decisions differently than male prosecutors, as predicted by the theory of representative bureaucracy. Finally, we find that female prosecutors with higher levels of prosecutorial experience are more likely to accept domestic violence and sexual assault charges against male defendants than both their male counterparts and female prosecutors with limited experience. Our results suggest that female prosecutors reserve their discretion for complex scenarios where organizational routines are less set in stone. Furthermore, female prosecutors with more experience may be more able to identify these scenarios, and are thus more likely to actively represent.