Assessing the Impact of Plea Bargaining on Subsequent Violence for Firearm Offenders, Maryland, 2015-2019

The purpose of this study was to assess how patterns of prosecution and plea bargaining in firearms cases shape subsequent case and defendant outcomes. Drawing on recent work (Johnson and Larroulet, 2019), the researchers developed measures of plea bargaining discounts and examined their effects on sentencing and recidivism for firearms-involved offenders. To do so, the investigators [1] analyzed unique data collected by the Client Legal Utility Engine (CLUE), a web-scraped database of court records for all criminal cases in the State of Maryland for a cohort of defendants charged with firearms-involved crimes in district and circuit courts between 2015 and 2019; [2] generated estimates of the average distance traveled in charge bargaining, or the magnitude of average sentencing discounts in gun cases in Maryland by comparing expected sentences based on the original filed charges to the final charges at conviction; and [3] explored the association between plea discounts and recidivism, measured by the defendant coming back into the criminal court system on new criminal charges. The resulting dataset includes information on criminal case processing outcomes for firearms-related cases processed in Maryland district and circuit courts for the time period 2015-2019.