Court system, prosecutors don't check data for signs of possible racism

Mark Hayward, The New Hampshire Union Leader, Manchester
·5 min read

Apr. 5—Two prominent New Hampshire prosecutors said they don't believe race plays a factor in decisions by prosecutors, judges and juries, though data to back that up are not being analyzed.

Reform advocates say Blacks and Hispanics are arrested and imprisoned at a higher rate than Whites in New Hampshire, and data is needed at all points in the system to understand what's happening.

States across the country are grappling with questions of racial disparity in police encounters and the criminal justice system, a point brought home last week with the start of the trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd.

The New Hampshire court system and at least some county prosecutor offices collect data on a criminal defendant's race, according to officials with both systems. But the court system said its Odyssey case management system, which is about 10 years old, doesn't permit data analysis along the lines of race.

"While race and other demographic information can be and often is entered, Odyssey lacks the functionality to produce reports on these criteria," spokesman Susan Warner wrote in an email.

Also, information about race and other demographics come from police and cannot be verified, she said in an email.

But, said Joseph Lascaze, Smart Justice organizer for ACLU-New Hampshire, "Something somewhere is happening that's feeding this growing disparity" in arrests and imprisonments.

Lascaze said he has experienced it personally. He was arrested along with Whites in a 2005 robbery, a bad choice he said he made when young.

His White co-defendants received sentences of house arrest and probation; he was imprisoned. Lascaze wants to analyze divergent plea deals involving multiple defendants of different racial backgrounds.

"It is happening, I know it's happening. This is why the data is so important," Lascaze said.

Police, prisons have data

Like the state court system, the state's largest county uses a case management system that captures data about race, said Hillsborough County Attorney John Coughlin. The system, named Karpel, is used in some other counties as well, Coughlin said.

He said no one has ever analyzed the data in his office in terms of race and outcomes of cases.

"It'd be interesting as a project for someone. Would it help in terms of prosecution? I don't think so," said Coughlin, a retired district court judge who was elected county attorney last year.

As a judge and a prosecutor, he never considered race as a factor in his work, he said.

Meanwhile, the two ends of the criminal justice system — the police/arrest end and the prison end — do collect and report data about race and other demographic factors.

Arrest data are available in terms of race, and a state website allows researchers to drill down and compare arrests on a town-by-town and crime-by-crime basis.

On the other end, the state Department of Corrections each month provides basic population counts at state prisons, including demographic breakdowns.

In August, Gov. Chris Sununu's law enforcement accountability commission called for law enforcement to broaden the data that police collect. Endorsed by Sununu and former Attorney General Gordon MacDonald, the recommendations called for the collection and publication of demographic data for other police interactions, such as citations, motor vehicle stops and subject stops.

Those recommendations were rejected by the New Hampshire Senate, with Judiciary Committee Chair Sharon Carson, R-Londonderry, saying the effort would divide society even more.

But the commission did not make any recommendations about gathering data from the court system or prosecutors. Lascaze, who was a member of the commission, said he did not want to ask for too much at once, fearing pushback.

Sentences questioned

Another example of a disparity involves Nashua resident Eduardo Lopez, who was sentenced to life in prison without parole for a first-degree murder he committed while 17.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned mandatory life sentences for minors, a Hillsborough County Superior Court judge re-sentenced Lopez to 45 years to life.

Meanwhile, Robert Dingman was sentenced to 40 years to life for killing both his parents when he was 17.

Lopez' brother, Aaron Lopez, acknowledged that his brother also shot and wounded another person and fought with a police officer.

But in the end, his brother killed one person and will do five more years behind bars than a White person who killed two people, Lopez said.

"It's a systemic thing," said Lopez, who is Puerto Rican. "You see someone with dark skin, they automatically think the worst."

He also points to Antwan Stroud, a Black man sentenced to 30 days in jail while two Whites were cleared in connection with unrest in Manchester following the death of George Floyd.

Some states do analysis

Jeffery Strelzin, a prosecutor who heads the Division of Public Protection of the New Hampshire Department of Justice, said the sentences in the Lopez and Dingman cases were determined by two different judges.

Both are under appeal, so Strelzin cannot discuss them in detail, he said. But he said Lopez' lawyers did not raise the issue of race in their appeal. And he said his office sought 50-year sentences in both cases.

"We decide cases based on the facts and the law. There's nothing about race that enters into our determination," said Strelzin, an associate attorney general. He said he does not know the race or ethnicity of defendants, including Lopez, and that it is not relevant to his job.

Strelzin said the document retention system used by the attorney general, ProLaw, does not allow for data analysis.

Other states have released data collected by their courts to analyze the justice system.

Last year, the Criminal Justice Policy Program of Harvard Law School released a lengthy analysis of racial disparities in the Massachusetts justice system.

It relied on data from the Massachusetts courts, its Criminal Justice Information Services and the state Department of Corrections.

To Lopez, an account executive in a Massachusetts software firm, when the New Hampshire court system says it lacks the functionality to analyze the data, it means they don't want to spend the money to.

"The data's there," Lopez said. Let's be honest, you can pull that data up."

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