Three major takeaways we learned from ‘Dismissed,’ NBC News’ investigation into how few violent sex crimes end in a conviction

Ninety-nine of the 400 convicted were never sentenced to prison.

From 2018 to 2020, court records show 1,039 alleged victims of sexual violence in Chicago. In 303 cases, the suspect had one or more prior sexual convictions or there were multiple accusers in the same case.

For each sex crime defendant identified among those thousand cases, journalists looked up their entire history in the U.S. criminal justice system. They found another 436 alleged victims of those defendants.

Suspects of different races were prosecuted at approximately equal rates. But the race of the victim was correlated with different outcomes.

In most cases, it was not possible to know the race of the victim because the case never went to court or was not prosecuted. But when a victim’s race could be identified in the police report, suspects accused of assaulting white victims were more likely to be convicted of a sex crime.

The Chicago Police Department did not respond to requests for additional comment from NBC 5 Chicago or NBC News.

In California, stricter laws do not lead to more convictions

Unlike most states, California prohibits defendants from pleading guilty to an alleged sex crime to a lesser charge. The practice was banned when the state passed a tough sex offender law in 2006.

Then-state Sen. Elaine Alquist, who introduced the bill, said at the time that the law would make it easier “to put sex offenders behind bars, easier to keep them there, and easier to keep them under control if they get out.” .”

Despite the plea deal ban, Los Angeles had the lowest conviction rate of any region NBC News reviewed. There, only 1.4% of violent sexual crimes ended in conviction between January 2, 2018 and January 2, 2024.

In San Francisco, accusers reported 1,442 sex crimes between 2018 and 2023. Of those, 74 resulted in at least one conviction on any charge, for a rate of 5.1%.

And in San Diego County, 10 law enforcement agencies received 4,987 reports of sexual violence crimes between 2021 and 2023. So far, 386 have been convicted.

Of those 386 convictions, one-third resulted in a sentence that kept the offender off the sex offender registry.

Despite California’s plea ban, 1 in 4 sex crime defendants in California’s San Mateo County negotiated plea deals that did not involve sex crime convictions. In one case last April, a defendant with an alleged videotaped confession was still able to plead guilty to a non-sexual crime.

In December, the victim, Carrie Banks, filed a civil lawsuit against the district attorney’s office alleging that it failed to protect her rights under Marsy’s Law, California’s victim protection law.

“Not only did this guy do whatever he wanted to me, but so did the DA’s office, the probation department, victim services and rape trauma. All of these people just made things worse,” Banks told NBC Bay Area.

San Mateo County declined to comment to NBC News about the pending litigation.

Methodology

To match criminal incidents to potential suspects, who may commit more than one crime, reporters gathered 60 gigabytes of records from 16 different agencies and their courts to analyze the results of some of the worst crimes.

Although experts warn that many sexual crimes go unreported, for this project NBC News focused on sexual violence crimes reported specifically to city law enforcement agencies. Whenever possible, NBC News reporters tried to obtain at least 10 years of data from local jurisdictions, from 2013 to 2023.

Cities with local NBC-owned stations: Boston; Chicago; Dallas-Fort Worth; the District of Columbia; Hartford, Connecticut; Los Angeles; New York City; Philadelphia; San Diego; and San Francisco, were included in this research. However, at the time of publication, police departments and local governments in Washington, DC, and New York City have not provided the necessary data and were not part of the analysis. The journalists appealed all records request denials and won challenges filed with appeals officials in Pennsylvania, Texas, Massachusetts and New York.

The journalists focused on reconstructing conviction rates for the most violent sexual crimes, such as rape, sodomy, sexual assault and child sexual abuse. In most jurisdictions, journalists excluded possession of child sexual abuse material, statutory rape, and failure to register as a sex offender. In Chicago, reporters included all violations that could put the defendants on the sex offender list, including a conviction for possession of child sexual abuse material.

Where possible, journalists linked crimes to convictions by incident number. If not available, reporters counted the number of sexual offenses in a given time period and the number of convictions in which the date of the offense fell within that same time period.

Catherine Allen and Jiachuan Wu contributed. Illustration by Leila Register.



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