Over the last twenty years, the scholarly field of erroneous convictions has skyrocketed, with multiple articles and books exploring the failures that convict the innocent. However, there has been comparatively little attention to the other side of the coin, failed prosecutions, when the criminal justice system falls short in convicting the likely perpetrator. In this Article, we take up an analysis of failed prosecutions, simultaneously seeking to define its breadth and explain its relation to erroneous convictions. We explore potential hypotheses for the existence of failed prosecutions and then compare those theories to a set of failed prosecutions compiled from a moderately-sized district attorney’s office. With almost no prior research on failed prosecutions, these empirical data help to put meat on the theoretical bones of the concept. In the end, we argue that failed prosecutions and erroneous convictions may be seen as different sides of the same coin of miscarriages-of-justice. Not only do both reflect significant errors by the criminal justice system, but the sources of each also appear to be surprisingly similar.

在过去的 20 年里，错误定罪的学术领域飞速发展，多篇文章和书籍探讨了对无辜者定罪的失败。然而，当刑事司法系统未能将可能的肇事者定罪时，相对较少关注硬币的另一面，即失败的起诉。在本文中，我们对失败的起诉进行了分析，同时寻求定义其广度并解释其与错误定罪的关系。我们探索存在失败起诉的潜在假设，然后将这些理论与从中等规模的地区检察官办公室汇编的一组失败起诉进行比较。由于之前几乎没有关于失败起诉的研究，这些经验数据有助于将肉放在该概念的理论骨架上。最后，我们认为，失败的起诉和错误的定罪可能被视为误判的同一枚硬币的不同方面。两者不仅反映了刑事司法系统的重大错误，而且每个错误的来源似乎也惊人地相似。