Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Criminal Justice Data topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Judicial Council presents updated report on case dispositions by race and ethnicity; small disparities remain after controls
Summary
Judicial Council staff presented a statutorily mandated report showing modest racial and ethnic differences in criminal‑case outcomes; presenters warned data limits and noted 97% of convictions stem from plea deals.
The Judicial Council heard a detailed presentation of its statutorily required report on the disposition of criminal cases by race and ethnicity, with staff saying the analysis shows modest differences after accounting for case and defendant characteristics.
Francine Burns, director of Criminal Justice Services, told the council the report breaks outcomes into conviction, type of conviction (felony vs. misdemeanor), whether convicted defendants received probation or prison, and, for those sentenced to prison, the lengths of sentences. "Almost 97 of these are the result of pleas," Burns said, emphasizing that plea bargaining is the dominant driver of outcomes. Burns reported that Hispanic defendants in the recent data were about 2.2 percentage points more likely than white defendants to be convicted, while Black defendants were 1.4 percentage points less likely to be convicted in the raw comparisons presented.
Sal (Pipart/Piper), who led the technical analysis, walked the council through adjusted models that compare similarly situated defendants. He said the models reduced raw differences but did not eliminate them: "In 2021–22, for example, Hispanic defendants were 1.5 percentage points more likely to receive a prison sentence compared to similarly situated white defendants," he said, illustrating the metric by saying the model predicts an additional 15 people per 1,000 convicted Hispanic defendants may receive prison time who might not if they were white.
Members pressed staff on dataset limits. Burns and Sal said the report relies on Department of Justice data that do not indicate whether defendants were in custody at the time of plea, and that representation type (private counsel vs. assigned/public defense) is not available in the dataset. They noted the department's data are an incomplete but improving resource and said the council is working with DOJ and courts to secure better longitudinal information.
The council did not take formal action on this presentation; members asked staff to continue refining analyses and to explore whether additional data access can support county‑level or counsel‑type breakdowns.
