Attrition in Sexual Offences and Legal Procedural Models: The Italian Case

The paper examines the question if legal procedural models of the criminal process can be correlated to attrition at the court stage through the lens of the 1989 criminal procedure reform in Italy that switched from an inquisitorial investigative model to an accusatorial one. The data show a significant increase in conviction rates after the introduction of adversarial trial in the period 1990-1996. Possible reasons for the effectiveness of the accusatorial model in the Italian context are analyzed focusing on the absence of the jury and the victim participation in the criminal process as a “civil party”