Ramsey County study examines why prosecutors reject cases

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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.

The analysis covered trends in declinations over time, common charges and reasons for declining, declination rates by charge type and race or ethnicity, and how long declined cases took to resolve.

According to Choi, the most common reason for declination — to the tune of about 80% of the time — was insufficient evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. That often meant more investigative work was needed, or the case involved charges that should be handled by a city attorney.

“The public wouldn’t want us to be charging people, I don’t think, if we didn’t have enough evidence,” Choi said. “Some cases could be referred to the city attorney, but this study didn’t look into that because they didn’t have enough data.”

Choi pointed out that at least in the metropolitan area, the county attorney customarily handles adult felony crimes, but the city attorney usually handles misdemeanors and gross misdemeanors.

“A lot of cases involving theft or domestic violence might come here first, but often there isn’t enough evidence to prosecute at the felony level,” said Choi.

Thanks in large part to court shutdowns during COVID-19, 2020 saw a peak in declined cases (2,556) and declination rate (53.9 percent). The resulting backlog led to the fewest declinations occurring in 2023: 1,657 total cases and a 30.7 percent rate as a percentage of dispositions.

The county’s declination rate rose in 2024 to 34.3 percent, possibly due to higher-than-usual staff turnover among law enforcement, investigators and prosecutors.

While the raw data that fed the report was already available via a data dashboard on the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office website, Choi’s office decided that it would be worthwhile to provide it in a more accessible form. The study was paid for with surplus civil asset forfeiture funds that the county had.

“We felt we needed to go deeper because the pandemic left people with questions about charging rates,” Choi said. “We didn’t prosecute fifth-degree drug cases and some other low-level felonies during that time.”

JIL provides data-driven products aimed at encouraging a more fair and effective justice system. The organization had previously done a report for the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office when it instituted a traffic-stop policy change earlier in the decade.

Driving production of the recent Ramsey County report were Jess Sorensen, a data visualization engineer, and Rory Pulvino, JIL’s chief implementation officer.

Pulvino said it’s a bit unusual for JIL to do a study like this for a district or county attorney’s office the size of Ramsey County’s, because that level of research is usually the province of bigger and deeper-pocketed jurisdictions.

“There’s just not a lot of strong data analysis done on behalf of prosecutors’ offices, except in bigger areas like Chicago or San Francisco,” he said. “It was nice to take a look at a mid-sized city, because that gives you a better idea of what the median is.”

Sorensen, who wrote the report, said that the lack of evidence that sometimes leads to prosecutors to decline a charge occasionally has its roots in faulty communication between prosecutors and the arresting officers involved in a case.

“That to me was the most interesting finding [in the report],” she said. “There are declinations where more investigation was required, but that wasn’t effectively communicated to all the relevant groups.”

Choi said the goal of the report was to provide a greater level of context and transparency to what can seem like a cryptic decision-making process.

“People will see that these numbers, historically, are in alignment,” said Choi. “Since I became county attorney in 2011, we’ve tended to have a charging rate between 55% and 65%. So we’re maintaining that standard.”

“I think John Choi’s office is using this data to better work with police and do a better job of capturing cases that warrant prosecution or diversion,” added Pulvino.

A second, related document, termed the Second Look Policy, was created by the county and distributed to Ramsey County law enforcement leaders and departments last month. That document provides a protocol guide for investigators who disagree with a charging attorney’s decision to decline prosecution of a case they presented.

Get the JLL report here.