In Brief
- Ramsey County prosecutors declined 38.4% of referred cases from 2018-2024
- Insufficient evidence was cited in roughly 80% of declination decisions
- COVID-19 court shutdowns contributed to spike in declined cases in 2020
- New “Second Look Policy” outlines review process for disputed declinations
How often do prosecutors turn down cases? And why? Some county attorneys might be loath to go into public detail about such things, but the Ramsey County Attorney‘s Office recently decided to shed some light on the subject.
The office of County Attorney John Choi commissioned the Washington, D.C., nonprofit Justice Innovation Lab (JIL) to create data‑driven report analyzing prosecutorial declination decisions from 2018 to 2024.
The main finding of the study, which took six months to compile and write, was that from 2018 to 2024, 61.6 percent of referred cases in Ramsey County were charged, while 38.4 percent were declined. The charging rate was a few points higher than that of the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office in the same period. Each case was tied to a single defendant, as co‑defendants could not be identified in the dataset…