Mona Lynch

• Professor (Full) at University of California, Irvine

A central goal of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is to deconstruct the “jurisprudence of color-blindness” that is infused with the language of equality while operating to maintain racial hierarchies. Color-blind ideology extends to the procedures governing criminal juries, ensuring they are disproportionately white while constraining diversity of persp...

The article argues for a more robust incorporation of law in the criminological study of sentencing and punishment.

Building on research demonstrating significant differences in how Black and White Americans view law enforcement, this study assesses how those differential views shape potential jurors’ decision-making in the context of a federal drug conspiracy case in which the primary evidence against the defendant is provided by an FBI agent and an informant c...

Recent punishment and society scholarship has addressed the limits of policy reforms aimed at reducing mass incarceration in the U.S. This work has focused in particular on the political dimensions of penal legal reform and policy-making, and the compromises and shortcomings in those processes. Nearly absent in this scholarship, however, has been e...

The limited existing research on how jurors evaluate informant testimony suggests jurors may not be appropriately responsive to cues that could signal informant unreliability. In particular, jurors may fail to account for and properly weigh evidence that an informant is testifying for an incentive when reaching a verdict. However studies in this ar...

Judges are increasingly using “implicit bias” instructions in jury trials in an effort to reduce the influence of jurors’ biases on judgment. In this paper, we report on findings from a large‐scale mock jury study that tests the impact of implicit bias instructions on judgment in a case where defendant race was varied (Black or White). Using an exp...

The current study examines how key internal U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) policy changes have been translated into front-line prosecutorial practices. Extending courts-as-communities scholarship and research on policy implementation practices, we use U.S. Sentencing Commission data from 2004 to 2019 to model outcomes for several measures of pros...

Objective: The present study integrates several distinct lines of jury decision-making research by examining how the racial identities of the defendant and an informant witness interact in a federal drug conspiracy trial scenario and by assessing whether jurors' individual racial identity and jury group racial composition influence their judgments...

Prosecutorial discretion in charge selection has far-reaching consequences throughout the criminal adjudication process. Through their initial charging decisions, prosecutors not only determine who will be subject to the state’s penal power—they also define the terms under which defendants will strategize and negotiate to mitigate their potential p...

“Focal concerns” is the predominant theoretical framework in criminology for explaining disparities in sentencing outcomes. While the framework has generated a large body of empirical scholarship, its postulates remain inadequately tested in the criminological literature. In this paper, I offer a conceptual and methodological critique of focal conc...

Frank Zimring and Gordon Hawkins’s 1991 book, The Scale of Imprisonment, was a pioneering intellectual effort to explain what was then just coming into view to social scientists and legal scholars: the massive growth and transformation of American criminal justice, particularly as manifested in what soon came to be called mass incarceration. Zimrin...

This article addresses the question of policy circumvention in federal courts by examining how legal actors have differentially adapted their adjudicatory practices after U.S. v. Booker (2005) rendered the federal sentencing guidelines advisory rather than mandatory. By linking two distinct bodies of scholarship-the courts-as-communities scholarshi...

In this article, I explore variations in prosecutors’ discretionary case selection practices by drawing on findings from a comparative field research project of drug prosecutions conducted in four federal districts. Using data from a series of in-depth interviews with legal actors in each district, I develop a typology of the kinds of drug cases br...

In this article, we empirically examine jurisdictional variations in federal crack prosecutions to measure whether aggressive crack prosecutorial practices are associated with racial inequality in federal caseload characteristics and outcomes. Building on theories that address the production of inequality in institutional settings, we hypothesize t...

Death qualification has been shown to have a number of biasing effects that appear to undermine a capital defendant's Sixth Amendment right to a fair jury. Attitudes toward the death penalty have shifted modestly but consistently over the last several decades in ways that may have changed the overall impact of death qualification. Specifically, the...

Scholars have documented the explosion in quantification of social phenomena within organizational settings. A key site of the quantitative turn has been in the penal-legal field, with purported transformative effects. This article draws from a field research project examining the on-the-ground implementation of the federal sentencing guidelines to...

In this chapter, Mona Lynch proposes a “social psychology of criminal procedure.” The term conceptualizes local criminal justice processes and outputs in a multivariate way: by simultaneously considering individual “situated actors,” their institutional contexts, and the ways that rules engage, constrain, and are interpreted by both individuals and...

Drawing from data obtained in a comparative study of US district courts’ criminal justice practices, this paper examines adjudication processing responses at the intersection of immigration and drug offences in a Southwestern federal district court, where the logic of immigration enforcement subsumes more traditional federal drug law enforcement. I...

https://www.russellsage.org/publications/hard-bargains

After two grand juries failed to indict the police officers that killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014, our nation has engaged in polarizing discussions about how juries reach their decision. The very legitimacy of our justice system has come into question. Increasingly, deep concerns have been raised concerning the role of race and gender i...

The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, developed by the United States Sentencing Commission in the 1980s, appear to exemplify the turn from individualization toward aggregated, rationalized risk management that ostensibly became hegemonic in the late 20th century. In this article, we challenge that presumption by building on Harcourt’s (2007) argument...

This essay reviews foundational and cutting-edge social science research on capital punishment. It first describes policy-relevant work on the death penalty as legal punishment, and then provides a brief overview of the more recent contributions on capital punishment and social theory. The scope of relevant scholarship is limited to more empiricall...

This article explores the role of emotion in the capital penalty-phase jury deliberations process. It is based on the qualitative analysis of data from ninety video-recorded four to seven person simulated jury deliberations that examined the influence of race on death sentencing outcomes. The analysis explores when and how emotions are expressed, i...

The death penalty occupies a unique position in social science and law. Despite the fact that it directly affects only a relatively small number of people, it is one of the most extensively studied aspects of the criminal justice system. There are several reasons for this high level of scholarly interest, including the fact of what is at stake in d...

In 1992, joe Arpaio was elected Maricopa County (AZ) Sheriff as a candidate of ‘integrity and administrative ability’’ who offered ‘the best chance of reforming our clownish sheriff’s department’ (Arizona Republic Editorial 1992). Maricopa County is the fourth-largest county in the nation (Eagly 2011.) and home to Phoenix, a nationally influential...

Legal change and sentencing norms in the wake of Booker: The impact of time and place on drug trafficking cases in federal court

This talk provides an overview of the primary data sources for death penalty research and its limitations. We will then examine data requirements for research at each stage of a capital prosecution. We are particularly interested in exploring the ways that politics, luck, institutional legacies, or other irrational factors limit researchers access...

This article explores selective drug law enforcement practices in a single municipality, San Francisco, where racial disproportionality in drug arrest rates is among the highest in the United States. We situate this work in the vein of recent case-study examinations done in Seattle, Cleveland, and New York to help build a more nuanced picture of ho...

In light of the potential paradigm-shifting nature of AB 109, California’s Realignment policy, which was instituted in the wake of Brown v. Plata, this article delineates several key research trajectories that might be pursued in order to understand its sociolegal impacts on the county criminal justice systems responsible for implementation. It out...

The federal sentencing guidelines, which dictated sentence outcomes for federally convicted defendants for more than two decades, have lost some of their authoritative force since the U.S. Supreme Court in US v. Booker (2005), Gall v. US (2007) and Kimbrough v. US (2007) declared that the guidelines are merely advisory in determining criminal sente...

Numerous scholars have described how the ‘war on drugs’ has played a central role in US penal change, especially its racialized impact.Yet there remain aspects of this ‘war’ that are under-explored in punishment and society scholarship.This article delineates five distinct modes by which the contemporary regulation of drugs in the USA speaks to pen...

This Article analyzes the processing of homicide cases in Los Angeles County from 1996 to 2008 to measure the time-costs of pursuing cases capitally and to examine how prosecutorial discretion in homicide charging is exercised in this jurisdiction. To answer these questions, we explore two related outcomes: (1) the odds of a "death-notice" filing a...

This article examines the problem of racial bias in capital cases generally and its operation within capital juries in particular. We provide a brief summary of the empirical research that demonstrates how juror demographics and defendant race interact to produce race-based death sentencing. We then explore some of the psychological dynamics that a...

Research Summary In this article, I have three major aims. First, I examine in detail the role that changes to legal policies and practice have played in the rise of mass incarceration. I look at four distinct aspects of legal change and argue that the law (and legal change) in these varied forms is the engine that has driven prison growth and, the...

In this article, I have three major aims. First, I examine in detail the role that changes to legal policies and practice have played in the rise of mass incarceration. I look at four distinct aspects of legal change and argue that the law (and legal change) in these varied forms is the engine that has driven prison growth and, therefore, must be a...

This article examines the nature of racial bias in the death sentencing process. After reviewing the various general explanations for the continued significance of race in capital cases, we report the results of an empirical study in which some aspects of racially biased death sentencing are examined in depth. Specifically, in a simulated capital p...

This article uses a case study of selective drug law enforcement in Cleveland, Ohio, to explore the contours of institutional racism in criminal justice policy and practice. Using the multilevel theoretical framework developed by Ian Haney Lpez (2000) that highlights the processes underlying how institutional racism is manifested, I analyze how and...

In this essay, I consider how Loic Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor adds to the diverse and growing body of scholarship about contemporary penal change. I begin with an overview of Wacquant’s major arguments and elucidations, then I focus in on how this work fits specifically within theorizations about, and empirical examinations of, late modern punis...

In this paper, I report on qualitative data from a large death penalty simulated jury experiment in which 100 small groups viewed a penalty phase of a capital trial, then deliberated and rendered verdicts. Specifically, I analyze the videotaped deliberations in order to explore some of the ways in which mock jurors emotionally react to the case, an...

In this chapter, I trace Arizona's prison siting and construction history to examine how cultural norms and traditions, economics, political prerogatives, and notions about the prison's purpose shape how such institutions are conceived, planned, and realized over time. By looking longitudinally at how prisons have come to be – as physical entities...

This study focused on whether and how deliberations affected the comprehension of capital penalty phase jury instructions and patterns of racially discriminatory death sentencing. Jury-eligible subjects were randomly assigned to view one of four versions of a simulated capital penalty trial in which the race of defendant (Black or White) and the ra...

This chapter reviews the existing empirical literature that examines the social psychological aspects of the trial court processes in American capital cases. Research related to prosecutorial decision-making in death penalty cases; capital jury selection and issues surrounding death qualification; defendant, victim, and witness effects; evidentiary...

In the late 20th century, the United States experienced an incarceration explosion. Over the course of twenty years, the imprisonment rate quadrupled, and today more than than 1.5 million people are held in state and federal prisons. Arizona's Department of Corrections came of age just as this shift toward prison warehousing began, and soon led the...

As a distinct class of criminals, sex offenders stand out as being particularly subject to the new “risk management” penal strategies that, according to a number of scholars, have come to dominate punishment rhetoric and practices in recent years. Nonetheless, the criminal justice policymaking that targets sex offenders appears to have a more emoti...

This article explores the use of web cameras inside a local penal facility in Phoenix, Arizona through which jail detainees’ daily routines were broadcast on the Internet over a two-year period. I question whether and how the logic behind broadcasting these penal images and the actual practice of capturing and distributing such images may indicate...

The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. David Garland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

In this article, I examine how the marketing of penal commodities and the use of ‘security’ as a selling point has developed and proliferated over the past 50 years in the US corrections market. Using data obtained from a contextual analysis of display advertisements from the correctional trade periodical, Corrections Today and its predecessors, I...

Capital punishment plays a contradictory, emotional role in American social and political culture. In particular, the relationship between this punishment and variously situated social actors suggests a complexity to contemporary penality that is not fully addressed by macro-level examinations of state punishment. In this article, I explore one ven...

Just over 20 years ago, criminologist Stanley Cohen put forth his vision of a newly evolving penal world which he called, “The Punitive City." He formulated his imagined punitive city based what appeared to him at the time to be emerging patterns of a novel form of social control that were distinguished by, among other things, the dispersal and pen...

Execution by electrocution—with its attendant smoke and flames and blood and screams—is a spectacle whose time has passed. The fiery deaths of Jesse Tafero and Pedro Medina and the recent bloody execution of Allen Lee Davis are acts more befitting a violent murder than a civilized state. Leander Shaw, Florida State Supreme Court, dissenting in Prov...

This study links two previously unrelated lines of research: the lack of comprehension of capital penalty-phase jury instructions and discriminatory death sentencing. Jury-eligible subjects were randomly assigned to view one of four versions of a simulated capital penalty trial in which the race of defendant (Black or White) and the race of victim...

This article reports on a set of findings from an ethnographic research project conducted in a parole field office in central California, specifically addressing how the notion of rehabilitation is expressed in parole discourse and practices. It appears that while the agency (and its field agents) still espouse the validity of normalization and ref...

This ethnographic research, conducted in a parole field office in central California, looks at how Feeley and Simon's (1992) "new penology" paradigm plays out at the level of implementation, given competing pressures on agents to be tough on crime as well as successful danger "risk managers." Findings suggest that agents embrace a traditional law e...

We report the results of two studies designed as follow-ups to our earlier research on the comprehension of capital penalty instructions. In the first study we examine whether a California penalty instruction that was revised by the courts to improve its comprehension by jurors accomplishes this goal. In the second study we content-analyze a sample...

Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997. Includes bibliographical references.

Examined 1 aspect of the force and effectiveness of capital instructions: the extent to which potential jurors comprehend the operative concepts of aggravation and mitigation and can distinguish them in the statutory list of enumerated factors that are used to determine life and death verdicts in California. Ss were 491 undergraduates (aged 19–36 y...