Prosecution or Persecution? Extraneous Events and Prosecutorial Decisions

Abstract

In 2004 a Dutch-Moroccan Islamic extremist in Amsterdam brutally murdered Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker known for his critique of Islam. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we show that, in Amsterdam, the assassination resulted in more than a 19-percentage-point increase in the likelihood of prosecution for unrelated violent crimes of male suspects born in Muslimmajority countries. The effect is detectable during the first month following the murder but dissipates thereafter. We find no evidence of the murder's effect for non-violent crimes and for violent crimes processed by other Dutch prosecution offices. Our findings are thus not consistent with a purely emotions-based explanation of the murder's effect. Instead, our results are congruent with both a signaling explanation, whereby career-motivated prosecutors chose to showcase their toughness, and a behavioral explanation entailing prosecutors' susceptibility to availability heuristic bias. On institutional grounds, we view the latter as more plausible than the former. Our paper adds to an emerging literature demonstrating that extraneous events can critically shape criminal justice outcomes.