"The Politics of Prosecution: Examining the Policymaking Role of Prosecutors"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper available via SSRN authored by Abhinav Sekhri. Here is the abstract:

This short paper focuses on prosecutors in the federal setting and contributes to this growing field of scholarship.  Through the lens of Prosecutorial Agreements in the sphere of corporate criminal liability, I demonstrate that prosecutors engage in important policy making exercises.  I argue that this analysis helps better understand the constrains in which prosecutorial discretion is exercises, and here I suggest how such an analysis offers a more nuanced reading of the prosecutorial charging practices in corporate crime over the last two decades.  I conclude by suggesting that examining the policymaking potential of prosecutors merits great attention today, as the importance of these actors within the criminal justice system is being appreciated beyond legal spheres.