The Quattrone Center has released “Videotaping Interrogations in Pennsylvania,” the first study to review Pennsylvania interrogation practices.

Recent scholarship has largely ignored the 1982 Supreme Court decisions of United States v. Frady and Engle v. Isaac, that rejected plain error’s applicability to procedural default in federal habeas corpus proceedings—i.e., to claims that should have been, but were not, timely presented at a pre-federal habeas stage. This Article presents the argument that it must now be rethought—especially as we mark the fortieth anniversary of these decisions this year.

This Article examines a hidden phenomenon in criminal punishment.

Ending cash payments for most low-level offenses is working for Greater Houston, research shows.

The Wave 2 report continues the work of the Sentinel Event Review (SER) Panel, a group of community members and officers of the Seattle Police Department (SPD) who are conducting an in-depth analysis of the protests that occurred in Seattle in the summer of 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

“Hidden Hazards” details the findings of the Center’s review of 4,644 opinions issued between 2000 and 2016 containing 7,207 separate claims of prosecutorial misconduct. Quattrone researchers found two categories of misconduct responsible for over half of the claims identified in the study: improper withholding of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors and improper comments made by prosecutors during closing arguments.

After making a lineup identification, eyewitnesses remember being more confident in their identification and having a better view of the initial crime if they are told they correctly identified the suspect compared to witnesses not given this feedback.

When a plaintiff files a civil lawsuit in federal court, her complaint must satisfy certain minimum standards. Specifically, under the prevailing understanding of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a), a complaint must plead sufficient factual matter to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face, rather than mere conclusory statements.

This article forthcoming in the Iowa Law Review improve incentives for prosecutors to avoid Brady violations and provide redress to victims of prosecutorial misconduct who currently lack access to justice. This works was conducted in conjunction with the UC-Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative. 

This study, conducted by Quattrone affiliates Bocar Ba and Dean Knox and co-authors in support of the Philadelphia Police Advisory Commission’s review of the city’s disciplinary process for police, demonstrates using comprehensive data on police complaints that complaints almost never result in disciplinary action, even when they allege serious violations of Constitutional rights

This working paper by Jonah Gelbach, supported by the Quattrone Center, develops new methods for testing for racial discrimination using real-world data. Abstract: In this paper I derive several straightforward restrictions imposed by the Becker model of discrimination in the highway search and pre-trial release contexts. I explain how these restrictions may be tested using real-world data at the decision level (e.g., whether to search or whether to release a defendant). I then apply one of these restrictions to Florida data used in Anwar& Fang’s (2006) influential study and more recent data from Harris County, Texas, provided by the Stanford Open Policing Project. The Florida data pass the restriction, but the Harris County data do not, with obvious implications for the appropriateness of the Becker model in each context. Further, data from both locations powerfully reject the prediction, from Knowles, Persico & Todd’s (2001, KPT) two-sided model, that drivers will carry contraband at identical rates. Next I apply the Becker model restrictions to published estimates from Arnold, Dobbie & Yang’s (2018) influential study of racial discrimination and pre-trial release. Their published estimates starkly violate the Becker model’s restrictions, regardless of whether these are viewed as flowing from animus or inaccurate stereotyping. It is unclear whether the culprit is econometric assumptions, a failure of the Becker model, or both. These findings suggest the importance of specification testing when we attempt to measure racial discrimination. They also suggest the need to consider alternatives to the workhorse Becker model, although doing so is beyond the scope of this paper.

In this article in Science, Quattrone Research Fellow Bocar Ba, Center affiliate Dean Knox, and Jonathan Mummolo and Roman Rivera offer a groundbreaking analysis demonstrating differences in policing behavior by the race of the officer in Chicago. Abstract: Diversification is a widely proposed policing reform, but its impact is difficult to assess. We used records of millions of daily patrol assignments, determined through fixed rules and preassigned rotations that mitigate self-selection, to compare the average behavior of officers of different demographic profiles working in comparable conditions. Relative to white officers, Black and Hispanic officers make far fewer stops and arrests, and they use force less often, especially against Black civilians. These effects are largest in majority-Black areas of Chicago and stem from reduced focus on enforcing low-level offenses, with greatest impact on Black civilians. Female officers also use less force than males, a result that holds within all racial groups. These results suggest that diversity reforms can improve police treatment of minority communities.