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Criminal Law
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Criminal Justice System Flowchart

Sam Kamin,
Dana Lindenberg

The so-called leaky pipe model of the criminal justice is crucial to understanding the practical realities of the administration of the American system.

The chart is here to give you a sense of the vastness and complexity of the criminal justice but, as the note indicates, it is not to scale. For example, as this table shows, of the 79,704 criminal defendants in federal court in the year studied, 71,550 pled guilty, while only 1,879 trials were held.

Criminal Justice System Flowchart

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