PSJ 54/4 2026-09-07
Original Ethnoracial Characteristics and Police Abuse Within Mexico's Criminal Justice System
Arturo Luna Cancino, Javier Reyes‐Martínez
PNAS 123/33 pp. e2603437123-e2603437123 2026-08-12 Original The relationship between officer misconduct and convictionless arrests
Bocar A. Ba, Nayoung Rim, Roman Rivera
Abstract
This paper examines whether officers with high prior alleged misconduct are more likely to make convictionless arrests (arrests that result in no or dismissed charges or where the defendant is found not guilty). Using the Chicago Police Department's rotational duty calendar to obtain plausibly exogenous variation in the set of officers assigned to work on a particular day, we find that high-misconduct officers make statistically significantly more arrests for nonindex crimes and in situations involving high officer discretion, compared to their no-misconduct peers. Our findings also suggest that downstream legal actors, such as prosecutors and judges, may be partially "correcting" these arrests.
WP 78/2 pp. 377-418 2026-04-01 Original Rightful Challengers: How Chinese Criminal Defense Lawyers Encourage Judge-Prosecutor Disagreement
Yue Hou, Jieun Kim
Abstract
abstract: In autocracies, courts are often perceived as tools of the autocrats, with lawyers viewed as lacking influence. The authors reassess these assumptions by examining criminal defense lawyers as "rightful challengers" within China's legal system. Analyzing an original data set of drug cases in Chinese criminal courts from 2014 through 2018, the authors find that when a lawyer is present, judges are three times more likely to reject prosecutors' arguments and twice as likely to deviate from prosecutors' sentencing recommendations. The deviation on average results in sentences that are shorter than the prosecutor's recommendation—shorter by more than two months in addition to the already shorter sentences judges give compared to prosecutors' recommendations. These findings suggest that lawyers can exert a substantial impact on judicial decisions by encouraging judge-prosecutor disagreement, particularly in cases that are less politically sensitive. Original interviews and close examination of lawyers' arguments reveal that the quality of defense is crucial for understanding lawyers' effectiveness in influencing court decisions. These results highlight how seemingly powerless societal actors, such as lawyers, can act as rightful challengers to powerful state actors within authoritarian regimes.