The Police-Prosecutor Charging Decision

<p><i><span>Prosecutorial charging decisions occupy a central yet opaque position in the American criminal legal system. The selection of offenses, grades, and counts determines pretrial detention exposure, structures plea bargaining, and anchors the range of punishment that governs case resolution. Despite sustained scholarly attention to prosecutorial discretion, empirical research has been constrained by limited data access: most studies observe only filed charges, without visibility into the baseline framing supplied by police at arrest or the internal judgments prosecutors make at intake. As a result, normative debates over overcharging, bargaining leverage, proportionality, and accountability often proceed without a clear account of how arrest-stage classifications are translated into filed charges—or how that translation itself structures power and outcomes in a plea-dominant system.</span></i></p><span><i>This Article addresses that gap through an original empirical study using rare administrative and adjudicatory data from a mid-sized U.S. County in 2019.</i><span>&nbsp;</span><i>This Article draws on an original dataset that links police-recommended charges, contemporaneous prosecutorial charging notes, prosecutor-filed charges, and charge-level dispositions within the same cases, offering rare insight into what scholars have long described as the “black box” of prosecutorial discretion.<span>&nbsp;</span>Analyzing 414 criminal cases comprising 1,340 charge lines, the study shows that prosecutors file more charges per incident than police recommend and selectively increase severity at the highest charge grades, even as average filed severity is modestly lower than police recommendations. These patterns are associated with distinct resolution outcomes, demonstrating that intake-stage charging adjustments carry meaningful consequences. Theoretically, the findings reconceptualize prosecutorial discretion as a translation process</i><span>&nbsp;</span><i>jointly shaped by police framing and prosecutorial judgment, rather than a unilateral exercise of authority. The Article further contributes a framework for evaluating charging practices in terms of how severity, leverage, and responsibility are distributed across institutional actors—offering implications not only for transparency, but for proportionality, bargaining fairness, and the allocation of accountability within the criminal process.</i></span><span></span>