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.
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