Felony Prosecutions Are Cheap

Earlier this week, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released the latest data from its periodic national surveys of prosecutors’ offices.  The report contains a lot of interesting information (albeit perhaps a bit dated — the survey was from 2007).

The number that struck me the most was $2,792 — what BJS reported as the average cost per felony prosecution in large jurisdictions.  This seems to me a remarkably low number in light of the very high stakes in a felony prosecution, both for the defendant and the community (incarceration costs, for instance, may average in the neighborhood of $30,000 per inmate per year).  Is $2,792 in prosecutorial costs really enough to ensure reliable decisionmaking at the charging and adjudication stages of a criminal case? For the cost of a family vacation to Disney World, we are deciding to send people to prison for five, ten, twenty years or more?

From the standpoint of private litigation practice anyway, this would be a rather small legal bill.  Admittedly, the comparison is problematic in many respects, but I don’t think it entirely irrelevant.

To be sure, the $2,792 both overstates and understates the costs in important ways.

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A Good Year for Marquette, But Not So Good for Legal Education

With the completion of the first full calendar year in Eckstein Hall, the establishment of the Law School as a premier center for public policy debates in Wisconsin, and the announcement of the Marquette Law School Poll, 2011 was a banner year for the Marquette Law School. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for legal education generally.

Scandals regarding the accurate reporting of employment statistics and student LSAT scores have rocked a number of law schools, and a handful of disgruntled former law students have gone so far as to file suit against their own institutions on the grounds of false advertising. And for the past several months a series of unflattering articles discussing the problems confronting American legal education have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and other prominent periodicals.

An article in the December 26, 2011, National Law Journal entitled “The Year the Chickens Came Home to Roost” sums up what was by any account a bad year for legal education.

Its list of top ten stories of the year for legal education includes:

1. the misreporting of data to the U.S. News and World Report by Villanova and the University of Illinois

2. student lawsuits against the Thomas Jefferson Law School , New York Law School, and Thomas Cooley

3. pending U.S. Senate hearings on the adequacy of the ABA’s oversight of legal education during the past decade

4. a ten-percent decline in the number of LSAT takers and in applications to law school

5. new ABA-dictated rules that require more rigorous and more detailed employment data reporting on the part of law schools

6. the elimination of the four-tier approach to law school rankings by US News

7. deans resigning under pressure at the University of Baltimore, the University of Texas, and the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth

8. the New York Times’ series of unflattering articles on legal education

9. the ABA proposal to eliminate from law school accreditation standards the traditional requirements that law schools recognize tenure for their faculties and make use of the LSAT in the admissions process

10. the introduction of “therapy dogs” for the purpose of reducing student stress at Yale, Arizona, Richmond, and other law schools.

Apparently the antitrust lawsuit filed on December 22 by the law school at Lincoln Memorial University after it was denied ABA provisional accreditation came too late to make the list.

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A Visit From the Ghost of Jury Service Past

What do you remember about November 29, 1995? That was the day when one of the jurors in Jesse Webster’s drug trafficking trial was out sick. The next day, with all twelve jurors again present, Webster was convicted. Many years later, Webster claimed in a petition for post-conviction relief that the eleven jurors who showed up on November 29 improperly proceeded with deliberations that day at the direction of a rogue bailiff.

In response to the petition, an investigator tracked down the jurors to ask them what they recalled about November 29, 1995. The interviews took place between 2001 and 2006. (Evidently, the investigation was not exactly a high priority.) The results, as the Seventh Circuit put it with considerable understatement in an opinion last week, were a “mixed bag”:

The first question was: “The court records show that on one day one of the jurors did not appear. Do you recall any such time when that might have occurred?” Seven jurors said they did not recall a juror being absent; four jurors said they did. Of the four who did remember a juror’s absence, three recalled that an alternate juror replaced the absent juror, a claim wholly unsubstantiated by court records. One of the four thought the juror was absent on the day before Thanksgiving; another claimed the juror was absent on the first two days of deliberations. Two correctly recalled that the absent juror was male; one said the absent juror was female. The second question was: “Do you recall being sent home early because of this juror’s absence?” The jurors answered either “no” or that they did not recall.

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