Day: June 17, 2026

Nearly 1 in 5 felony cases filed in Denver and resolved in 2025 was dismissed with no strings attached.

For misdemeanor cases, the rate was 1 in 4.

A criminal case might be dismissed for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, evidence falls apart. Law enforcement, prosecutor or lab errors can similarly derail a case. Or perhaps prosecutors decide that pursuing it no longer serves the interests of justice. These situations are a normal, inevitable and sometimes even desirable aspect of the legal system.

But other times, cases get dismissed because the system lacks the bandwidth to hold onto them. Heavy caseloads in prosecutors’ offices can lead to more of these dismissals, according to my recent research.

I am a professor who studies prosecutorial policy and decision making. I am also a co-manager of Prosecutorial Performance Indicators, a research and technical assistance project that collaborates with prosecutors’ offices across the country to promote transparency, equity and data-informed policy. Between 2021 and 2024, my research team partnered with elected district attorneys throughout Colorado to produce data dashboards that show statistics on criminal cases and outcomes.

My colleague Don Stemen and I then used data from that project to investigate how prosecutors responded to weekly fluctuations in their criminal caseloads. Weekly caseloads can vary by as much as 15% above or below the average across weeks in a Colorado judicial district, with a mean change of 6%. Our research shows that in weeks when active caseloads are higher, fewer cases get resolved via a plea deal. Instead, dismissal rates rise to compensate.

In other words, as cases pile up, more of them end up getting dropped.

Case outcomes in Colorado

In the American legal system, which relies on plea deals, guilty pleas account for an estimated 95% of criminal convictions across the country. Trials, though constitutionally guaranteed, are rare.

However, a notable share of cases do not result in a conviction at all.

Once a prosecutor has decided to file charges, cases can follow several pathways other than guilty plea or trial. Defendants may be screened for diversion programming, which redirects eligible individuals away from conviction and toward rehabilitative services, such as substance use or domestic violence offender treatment. They may also receive a deferred judgment, in which they initially plead guilty but avoid formal conviction if they can successfully complete conditions such as community service hours, counseling and remaining arrest-free for a set period of time. Other defendants see their cases dismissed outright by either a judge or prosecutor.

Across the half-million cases in our Colorado sample, about 45% were resolved in one of these alternative ways that avoided a criminal conviction.

Our sample includes all felony and misdemeanor cases resolved in 19 of Colorado’s 23 judicial districts between 2021 and 2024. Data was extracted from Action, the case management system used by prosecutors’ offices across the state, and shared by the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council.

Information from individual, public-facing data dashboards in the state show a similar reliance on alternatives to conviction. In the 20th Judicial District, which is Boulder, for example, 34% of felony cases resulted in a dismissal, diversion or deferred judgment in 2025. That was true for 50% of misdemeanors as well.

For misdemeanors in particular, this represents a 10% decline in the conviction rate in Boulder in just five years. It suggests that hundreds of defendants in less serious cases who would previously have been convicted now receive a different outcome each year.

Outright dismissals make up the bulk of misdemeanor nonconvictions in many jurisdictions. In the 18th Judicial District, which includes most of Aurora and Centennial, 56% of misdemeanor cases did not result in a conviction in 2025. Of those nonconvictions, 77% were dismissals.

Colorado’s dismissal rates do not appear to be outliers. Most prosecutors’ offices do not make their data available to researchers or the public, but more than 50% of all cases are routinely dismissed in some urban areas that do, such as Milwaukee and Philadelphia.

The pressure to dismiss

Prosecutors’ offices in Colorado are battling staff recruitment and retention shortages, with attorney vacancy rates above 50% in some offices.

Consequently, prosecutor caseloads have more than doubled in jurisdictions such as Golden, Colorado’s 1st Judicial District, where each prosecutor opened an average of four more felony cases or 122 more misdemeanor cases than they closed in 2025.

The rise of digital evidence, everything from body-worn camera footage to social media activity, has further increased the time and technology investment required to prosecute. Monthslong turnaround times for forensic testing create additional trouble, forcing prosecutors to proactively prioritize some cases for lab analysis over others.

Prosecutors’ offices across the U.S. are similarly struggling to hire and keep lawyers as they continue to grapple with technological challenges and case backlogs triggered by court closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Anchorage, hundreds of cases were dismissed because there were not enough prosecutors available to move them toward trial in 2024. In 2019, the passage of Kalief’s Law, which established stricter evidence disclosure requirements for prosecutors, sent misdemeanor dismissals caused by failure to meet trial deadlines skyrocketing from 9% to 48% within five years in New York City.

Making prosecution more efficient

Case dismissals triggered by a lack of resources could be construed as the recalibration of a historically punitive legal system. Dismissing more cases, especially low-level cases involving defendants with little to no criminal history, may benefit society more than maintaining high conviction rates. After all, it is expensive to be tough on crime, and the evidence that mass conviction and incarceration improves public safety is thin at best.

Even so, these dismissals are symptomatic of a system in crisis. There are too many cases and too few resources to handle them.

If prosecutors’ offices are able to implement more rigorous early case screening, they are likely to eliminate weak cases faster and with less resource expenditure. This may be particularly effective if prosecutors also use their discretion to decline more undeserving cases up front, treating the use of taxpayer dollars on prosecution as something that requires deliberate justification rather than something that happens by default.

Research suggests that greater selectivity at early stages of prosecution reduces caseloads more efficiently than dismissals later on. Selectivity also spares defendants and victims from the prolonged uncertainty of a lingering case. Though moves in this direction would require an up-front investment by prosecutors’ offices, the long-term benefits may be well worth the effort.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Rebecca Dunlea receives funding from the Microsoft Justice Reform Initiative and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Throughout history, rulers and political movements have used public spectacles of combat to evoke courage, sacrifice, collective strength and national purpose. From Roman gladiator contests to modern mixed martial arts, combat spectacles have served not merely as entertainment but as public rituals through which people experience belonging to something larger than themselves.

When President Donald Trump proposed staging a UFC championship event on the White House grounds as part of America’s 250th anniversary celebration, many observers treated it as another example of his affinity for spectacle and mixed martial arts, or MMA, a combat sport combining striking and grappling techniques from multiple martial arts disciplines. Yet the symbolism runs deeper than a president’s taste for theatricality and combat sports.

I’ve spent decades studying why people are willing to fight, sacrifice and even die for causes, and I see such spectacles illuminating an important psychological process known as identity fusion.

People belong to groups: families, nations, religions, professions, political movements, sports teams. Usually, these identities remain distinct from the personal self.

Identity fusion occurs when that boundary disappears. People do not just support a group – they experience it as an inseparable part of who they are. The group’s successes and failures become personal; threats to the group are experienced as threats to oneself.

The important question isn’t just what happens inside the cage – it’s what such spectacles can do for the audience. Public displays of courage, endurance and sacrifice can strengthen emotional bonds among spectators and deepen identification with the groups, causes or leaders they associate with those displays.

Research with soldiers and other front-line fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, supporters of Ukraine, Palestinians in Gaza, Taiwanese concerned about a Chinese invasion, and participants in extremist movements shows that identity fusion predicts willingness to endure hardship, accept risk and make sacrifices for a collective cause.

This process does not necessarily produce violence. It can motivate volunteerism, mutual aid, military service and resistance to oppression.

It helps explain how public rituals that celebrate courage, sacrifice and collective strength can deepen commitment to groups, causes and leaders under conditions that appear irrational from a purely material perspective.

Why shared struggle matters

One of the strongest pathways to identity fusion is shared hardship. People who endure danger, suffering or intense challenges together often emerge with unusually strong bonds.

Combat sports play into this dynamic. Fighters publicly test themselves against pain, exhaustion, fear and possible defeat. Spectators witness not simply athletic competition but symbolic demonstrations of courage and endurance. The attraction lies partly in how character is being revealed under pressure.

For ancient Romans, gladiators embodied “virtus” – courage, discipline, endurance and willingness to confront death. Their appeal stemmed not merely from violence but from values they represented.

Modern mixed martial arts is often celebrated in similar terms: a proving ground for toughness, resilience and self-mastery.

In both cases, physical contests become moral dramas about sacrifice and human limits.

MMA has become politically important

The significance of combat sports extends beyond professional competition.

Across Europe and North America, mixed martial arts has become a focal point for segments of the contemporary far right. Organizations known as Active Clubs, now found in countries including the United States, Germany, Sweden, France and Britain, combine physical training with ethnonationalist activism, including recruitment, ideological indoctrination, public demonstrations and transnational networking among ethnic – particularly white – nationalist groups.

Gyms provide venues for recruitment and networking, but their deeper significance is psychological. Training and enduring hardship together and testing oneself before peers generates forms of trust and solidarity difficult to reproduce online. Political commitment becomes literal and embodied.

This helps explain why mixed martial arts has acquired unusual importance within transnational, ethnonationalist networks. Activists from different countries may possess distinct national identities, yet they recognize one another through a shared culture of physical discipline, masculine camaraderie and readiness for struggle. Combat sports provide a symbolic language that transcends borders, reinforcing a broader civilizational identity.

In this respect, mixed martial arts performs a role similar to military training camps, revolutionary youth movements and fraternal organizations in earlier eras. It creates bonds simultaneously local and international.

From Nero to the White House

The Roman emperor Nero was unusual not because he sponsored gladiatorial games – many emperors did – but because, as historian Thomas Wiedemann observed, he openly identified with the arena’s culture. Rather than maintaining aristocratic distance, Nero linked his public image to the virtues and popularity of spectacle.

Something similar occurs whenever political leaders align themselves with combat sports. The significance lies less in the sport itself than in what the spectacle symbolizes. A combat event staged as part of a national celebration transforms athletic competition into a ritual of collective identity and public values.

The White House UFC event was especially revealing because it linked a combat spectacle to the commemoration of the American republic’s 250th anniversary and to Trump’s own 80th birthday. Symbolically, it joined nationhood, leadership and martial virtue in a single public performance.

The symbolism also intersects with recent calls by administration officials, including the newly dubbed “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth, to restore a “warrior ethos” to U.S. military and civic life. The warrior becomes not merely a soldier but an ideal citizen: disciplined, courageous, physically formidable and prepared for sacrifice.

Why spectators experience awe

Mass rallies, military parades, religious pilgrimages, revolutionary festivals and combat spectacles can all produce moments in which individuals feel absorbed into something larger than themselves.

Such experiences do not automatically lead to political extremism. Most do not. But they help explain why people become deeply attached to groups and causes that provide meaning, belonging and a sense of shared destiny.

Spectacular public rituals – especially those involving violence and pain – often evoke what British political philosopher and politician Edmund Burke called “the sublime”: intense experiences of danger, terror and grandeur that transform fear into exaltation before overwhelming power.

The attraction of combat spectacles lies not merely in violence or entertainment. Their enduring power comes from transforming individual contests into collective stories of courage, sacrifice, identity and purpose. They reveal a fundamental human desire not only for security and comfort, but also for struggle, significance and belonging – as George Orwell observed in 1940 when reviewing the allure of Hitler’s autobiography, “Mein Kampf.”

In an age when established political institutions and movements command diminishing loyalty, combat spectacles provide more than excitement. They create communities of feeling and, under the right conditions, powerful engines of political commitment.

Scott Atran previously received funding for related research from the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation