Judging Untried Cases

Judging Untried Cases

Professor Richman applauds Professor Wright for attempting to determine whether “the inexorable reduction in trials actually reflects an impairment of the federal criminal system’s truth-finding function.” However, he notes that Professor Wright overlooked one important factor in his analysis: the extent to which “the vanishing acquittal rate reflects an increase in the [federal] adoption of well-established ‘local’ cases.” Without more information, Professor Richman concludes, “aggregrate caseload statistics are . . . hard to interpret.”

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