While much of the empirical work in the criminal law space emphasizes the centrality of plea agreements, a recent paper, Disposing of Misdemeanors: An Empirical Perspective, provides a complicating wrinkle. In the paper, the authors, Cynthia Alkon (TAMU) et al., lever a unique data set drawing from New York State, that, to date, includes data on almost 1M criminal misdemeanor cases.
To be sure, plea bargains remain important. But as the figure (below) illustrates, dismissals also share center stage and they vary, dramatically, across New York State.
While largely descriptive and limited to data from a single state, the paper and its core findings will likely need to be accounted for in future work on criminal dispositions.