The Acquittal - A great Unknown of the Criminal Justice System - An Empirical Study of the Practical Meaning of Acquittals after Pretrial Detention and its Causes -

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jörg Kinzig
• Subject Area: Criminology
• Term: from 2014 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 259974409

As we carved out elaborately in the first-time proposal of the research-program The Acquittal - an Unknown of the Criminal Justice System? (Project no. KI 689/5-1), the scientific landscape of empirical criminology lacks in a differentiating analysis of the frequency and the importance of the acquittal. The research-group aims at closing this gap. It is to be clarified if an acquittal is more of an inevitable frictional loss of justice (Merbreier, 1970), or an avoidable error of the criminal justice system. The analysis of the statistics of law enforcement was conducted as scheduled in the first-time proposal. By contrast, the analysis of court files was considerably postponed due to delayed handling on the part of the Statistical State Offices on the one hand and the public prosecutor´s offices on the other. These delays led to the unexpected circumstance that the investigation of the court files could not have been finished until spring 2016. As the results of the court file-analysis are to form the basis of the planned expert interviews, those can only be conducted if the research team completed the investigation of about 300 proceedings of acquittals with pre-trial custody. The interviews are hence to discuss the results and to answer open questions resulting from them. Besides the continuation and consolidation of the court-file-analysis, the focus of the additionally requested funding period therefore lies on the realization and evaluation of the expert interviews. The existing temporary results indicate that the continuation of the research-program let expect to contribute significantly to research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants