Research
My research engages questions about criminal legal accountability by examining the investigation and prosecution of police officers accused of criminal misconduct.
My research examines prosecutorial decision-making in the investigation and prosecution of police officers, drawing on a broader project titled The Rarity of Police Prosecution: Prosecutors, the Law, and Police Misconduct.
While public demands for criminal accountability have intensified following allegations of police misconduct, indictments and convictions of police officers remain exceedingly rare. Through an analysis of the governing legal doctrines and original fieldwork examining the experiences, perspectives, and institutional environments of prosecutors responsible for these cases, my research explains why criminal charges against police officers are so uncommon. Across this body of scholarship, I show that even in cases involving clear allegations of police criminality, the likelihood of indictment remains low due to a combination of deferential and ostensibly settled legal standards, the social architecture of prosecutorial offices, and the complex political positioning prosecutors must navigate when pursuing charges against law enforcement.
Access Articles stemming from my research agenda below.
Drawing on in-depth interviews in 5 field sites across the nation, I consider how prosecutors and other legal professionals working in the domain of police suspect investigations manage and make sense of their positioning as legal practitioners, elected politicians, and employees working in complex hierarchical organizations.
“How Grand Jury Secrecy and Bias Protects and Perpetuates Police Impunity.”
Oregon Law Review, Volume 103, Issue 1.
The first step in criminal adjudication is through criminal indictment, or formally charging an officer with a crime. Indictment, hypothetically speaking, seems promising as American prosecutors have expansive and “virtually unreviewable” discretionary power, making them the most powerful actors in the criminal legal system.
However, police-suspect charging declinations stand in stark contrast with the popular idea that a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich if asked to do so. This is because relative to the tens of thousands of civilian complaints received annually, and despite the presence of incriminating evidence, police officers are seldom indicted, much less convicted, for violent crimes.
What explains the dearth in police-suspect indictment?
This Article demonstrates that the operation of legal rules within the grand jury context clarifies the discrepancy between civilian complaints, incriminating evidence, and police-suspect indictments. In this Article, I present three features that explain the rarity of police-suspect indictment. First, grand juries are secret legal proceedings. Second, I find that the grand jury selection process is cursory in comparison with petit juries, particularly when accounting for ideological opinions among jurors. Third, prosecutors not only confront grand jurors focusing on the characteristics of the victims of police violence, rather than police-suspects, and exhibiting the tendency to victim blame in order to justify an officer’s use of force, but they also encounter grand jurors who defer to police officer decision-making.
“The Paradox of Federal Oversight in Police Misconduct Investigations.”
Denver Law Review, Volume 103, Issue 1.
This Article examines the relationship between state prosecutors, federal prosecutors, and the Civil Rights Division inside the United States Department of Justice responsible for conducting police misconduct investigations and prosecutions. Previous literature documents prosecutors’ enormous concentration of power, yet they remain an understudied population in the criminal legal system, particularly as they investigate and prosecute police officers accused of crimes. To remedy this gap, this Article is one of the first to offer insights from some of the most select employees around the United States because these specific occupations are just that – uncommon, atypical, and exceptional in context of the potential universe of “line” or assistant prosecutors around the country.
The interview data demonstrates that police misconduct prosecutors do possess idiosyncratic and specialized skill sets. However, I find that mounting public pressure for police accountability coincides with limited prosecutorial expertise and proficiency in successfully prosecuting police misconduct around the United States. Police suspect prosecutors are not present in every jurisdiction or legal community. Such a sociolegal environment may encourage the sharing of ideas, resources, and knowledge between prosecutors that have unique insights regarding what constitutes persuasive evidentiary strategies helpful for securing indictments and convictions.
Yet, I expose a novel paradox: experienced prosecutors may reject exogenous support because they understand it as disruptive and oppressive surveillance by outsiders. Results demonstrate that growing demands for police accountability confront established occupational scaffolds and federal collaboration threatens longstanding notions of occupational autonomy, prosecutorial esteem, and risks oversight by outsiders. The Article concludes with important theoretical and practical implications for the prospect of future accountability as well as structural recommendations for facilitating criminal legal accountability for police misconduct in the future.
“The Architecture of Police Impunity.”
In response to rising demands for transparency and accountability following high-profile episodes of police violence, jurisdictions across the United States have adopted new investigatory mechanisms, including civilian oversight bodies, state-level special prosecutors, and in some cases, federal involvement. While a robust body of scholarship has theorized the limitations of these reforms, little empirical work has examined how they function on the ground or whether they meaningfully disrupt longstanding patterns of police impunity.
Drawing on original qualitative fieldwork in five American cities – including the first published interviews with police-suspect investigators who are typically shielded from public view – this Article provides the first sustained empirical examination of how investigations into police use of deadly force or serious injurious force unfold and how officers’ legal protections shape investigatory outcomes. Accordingly, this Article offers a rare, insider perspective on contemporary police-suspect investigations. The fieldwork presented here empirically substantiates and clarifies hypotheses advanced in the literature. I develop a layered framework demonstrating that investigative reforms are routinely constructed atop existing systems rather than replacing them outright. Despite their express purpose of mitigating conflicts of interest inherent in internal police investigations, these layers frequently leave control of the investigative process in the hands of police officers and their departments. This layered structure, when combined with police-suspects’ collective bargaining agreements, produces three recurring challenges: relational dependencies, temporal delays, and informational constraints that systematically insulate officers from criminal liability.
Findings illuminate how inter-organizational dynamics and entrenched legal protections frustrate efforts to produce timely, thorough, and impartial investigations into police misconduct. By providing empirical confirmation of claims that have largely rested on anecdote, inference, or doctrinal critique, this Article explains why indictments of police officers remain exceedingly rare, even in cases involving serious and ostensibly unreasonable force. In response, I advance seven concrete proposals designed to strengthen investigative integrity, enhance transparency, and build durable structures of police oversight. Together, these reforms aim to transform police-suspect investigations from opaque and compromised processes into mechanism capable of delivering legitimacy, accountability, and justice.
My larger research agenda builds upon my time living, learning, and practicing within the St. Louis legal community in the wake of Michael Brown’s death.
One of my papers, “Youth at the Center: A Timeline Approach to the Challenges Facing Black Children,” published in the Saint Louis University Law Journal, advances a novel typology entitled a “timeline approach to incarceration” which indicates the notable and unequal increases in the likelihood that Black Americans will come into contact with the criminal legal system virtually at all points throughout their lives. The timeline approach demonstrates that micro-choices at a macro-level discredit any assertion of a post-racial America and call into question foundational tenets of American justice.
I also engage in applied policy scholarship.
Under the auspices of the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and in the wake of Officer Jason Van Dyke’s killing of Laquan McDonald, I submitted a comparative analysis of United States Federal Judicial Consent Decrees to the Illinois Attorney General.
This report included an examination of four consent decrees from around the nation to offer guidance regarding the specific provisions that should be included in accountability processes in Chicago.
