Author

Bryan Briones

Date of Award

5-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Primary Advisor

Neal Coates

Secondary Advisor

Chris Riley

Abstract

In the criminal justice system, prosecutors (also known as District Attorneys) are granted discretion. Discretion gives prosecutors the ability to choose which cases to pursue, what plea deals to offer, and the suggested sentence for the crime. However, in the real world, prosecutors do not have as much power as many believe they do. While they do work in an important role, the media, T.V, movies, and even social media platforms have created a general misconception. In researching prosecutorial discretion, an attempt will be made to disprove any misconceptions and seek to educate society. The purpose of this study is to find what sentencing philosophies are being used in the field. In doing so, an attempt will be made to find a correlation between the sentencing philosophies at play and criminal justice statistics.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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