Is Chivalry Dead?: An Examination of Charge Reductions in One Ohio Jurisdiction

Abstract

Scholars continue to recognize the important role prosecutorial discretion plays in the criminal court system. Using a sample of felony cases referred to one Prosecutor’s Office in Ohio, the current study investigates whether true or selective chivalry exists by examining main and interactive effects of defendant sex on the likelihood of reduced charges and the magnitude of these reductions using a novel approach. Results suggest that true chivalry exists between White males and females, however, no significant differences were noted between Black and White females.

Keywords:

• Prosecutorial discretion
• charge reductions
• sex disparities

Notes

1 The research team was given remote access to all electronic documents. Finding, collecting, and electronically inputting the data was a very time intensive process, taking close to 60 min or more per case. The sample of 22% was identified to be feasible based on the number of hours available to collect the data and the project funds available to pay our data coders.

2 This scoring scheme follows the offense levels of the state. Felonies are divided into five levels, with felony 1 s being more severe than felony 5 s.

3 Specifications related to drugs and repeat sexual offending were considered, but could not be included in the models due to highly unstable estimates and standard errors resulting from a limited distribution of cases across prosecutors at level-2.

4 In order to aid the reader in interpreting the results presented, coefficients from the Bernoulli regression models were converted to odds ratios (see Table 3).