About

Mona Lynch is a Chancellor's Professor at the UCI School of Social Ecology, specializing in Criminology, Law & Society and Law. Her research and writing focus on the social, psychological, and cultural dynamics of contemporary criminal adjudication and punishment processes, including how those processes produce inequalities. She employs multiple methodological approaches such as experiments, surveys, ethnographic field methods, and archival and social artifactual analysis to explore her research questions. Her work has contributed to understanding the complexities of law and society, with her last book, 'Hard Bargains: The Coercive Power of Drug Laws in Federal Court,' awarded the 2017 Michael J. Hindelang Award by the American Society of Criminology.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Social psychology
• Public administration
• Criminology
• Psychology

Selected publications

• COOPERATORS, CREDIBILITY & CONVICTIONS: HOW JURORS RATIONALIZE USING UNRELIABLE INFORMANT TESTIMONY

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Trawling for Minnows on the High Seas: Criminal Law's Coercive Capacities and the U.S. Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Conspiracy of Drug Weight and the Case of MDLEA Defendants

  Federal Sentencing Reporter · 2025-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The federal sentencing guidelines for drug trafficking offenses use the metric of drug weight as a proxy for culpability in determining the seriousness of the offense. In light of the insights offered by McSweeney et al. in their report (in this issue) on the over-punishment of “boat defendants,” this article details how drug weight fails as a metric of culpability. I first outline how drug weight generally works in the context of federal drug case sentencing, including the different kinds of weight that can get counted against a given defendant. I then highlight the problems with its operationalization in practice, including the opportunities it engenders for abuse, thereby producing inequities and injustices. Finally, I examine the specific case of those charged under the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act (MDLEA), typically caught transporting large amounts of cocaine in boats and other vessels on the high seas, to show how these defendants represent the culmination of problems in elevating drug weight as a key sentencing criterion.

  PublisherDOI

• Police Talk in the Jury Room: The Production of Race-Conscious Reasonable Doubt among Racially Diverse Jury Groups

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Trawling for minnows on the high seas: Criminal law's coercive capacities and the U.S. Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act

  Punishment & Society · 2025-09-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act (MDLEA) was passed in 1986 by the U.S. Congress at the height of the American drug war frenzy, further empowering the U.S. government to arrest and prosecute suspected drug traffickers nearly anywhere in the world when transporting drugs by sea. In this article, we use a case study of MDLEA prosecutions in the District of Puerto Rico to identify and delineate five distinct characteristics of criminal law's coercive capacity: (1) jurisdictional capacity; (2) defendant pool capacity; (3) charging capacity; (4) evidentiary capacity; and (5) punishment capacity. While some aspects of the MDLEA are unique, many of these capacious features are inherent to contemporary U.S. criminal law more broadly. Using data from interviews with legal actors, we show how criminal law's capacities work together to ensure convictions and long prison sentences even in the face of formal legal roadblocks. We conclude by suggesting that without scaling back the capacity of such laws, the punitive war on crime in the United States will not only persist but can easily be ramped up to serve political and/or organizational interests.

  PublisherDOI

• (Re-)centering Law in the Criminology of Sentencing & Punishment

  CrimRxiv · 2024-04-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this essay, I argue for a more robust incorporation of law in the criminological study of sentencing and punishment. In doing so, we should also attend to processes as vigorously as we do to outcomes to better understand how elements of the law are key and variable tools used by legal actors to produce legal punishment. Now this may sound obvious (and it may well be). It may also sound like I am arguing that we become doctrinal scholars (I am not).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Police talk in the jury room: the production of race-conscious reasonable doubt among racially diverse jury groups

  Law & Society Review · 2024-11-26

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract A central goal of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is to deconstruct the “jurisprudence of color-blindness” that is infused with the language of equality while operating to maintain racial hierarchies. Color-blind ideology extends to the procedures governing criminal juries, ensuring they are disproportionately white while constraining diversity of perspectives, especially regarding policing issues. In this paper, we merge CRT insights about color-blindness and race-consciousness in the criminal jury context and in the Fourth Amendment law governing policing, to advance empirical socio-legal scholarship on race and jury decision-making. We analyze deliberations data from mock jury groups that decided on verdict in a federal drug conspiracy trial, focusing on how groups talked about law enforcement testimony. We find that negative discussions of the law enforcement testimony is associated with shifts toward acquittal, there are more skeptical discussions about this testimony when the defendant is Black, and that the presence of at least one Black juror in any given group is associated with more skeptical discussions of law enforcement testimony. Our qualitative analysis illustrates how Black jurors, in particular, raised concerns about policing, including unjust treatment of Black citizens, then successfully tied those concerns to the specific legal considerations at issue in the case.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• (Re-)centering Law in the Criminology of Sentencing & Punishment

  Criminology Criminal Justice Law & Society · 2024-03-31 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The article argues for a more robust incorporation of law in the criminological study of sentencing and punishment.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Police talk in the jury room: the production of race-conscious reasonable doubt among racially diverse jury groups

  CrimRxiv · 2024-11-26

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A central goal of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is to deconstruct the “jurisprudence of color-blindness” that is infused with the language of equality while operating to maintain racial hierarchies. Color-blind ideology extends to the procedures governing criminal juries, ensuring they are disproportionately white while constraining diversity of perspectives, especially regarding policing issues. In this paper, we merge CRT insights about color-blindness and race-consciousness in the criminal jury context and in the Fourth Amendment law governing policing, to advance empirical socio-legal scholarship on race and jury decision-making. We analyze deliberations data from mock jury groups that decided on verdict in a federal drug conspiracy trial, focusing on how groups talked about law enforcement testimony. We find that negative discussions of the law enforcement testimony is associated with shifts toward acquittal, there are more skeptical discussions about this testimony when the defendant is Black, and that the presence of at least one Black juror in any given group is associated with more skeptical discussions of law enforcement testimony. Our qualitative analysis illustrates how Black jurors, in particular, raised concerns about policing, including unjust treatment of Black citizens, then successfully tied those concerns to the specific legal considerations at issue in the case.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Prosecutors as punishers: A case study of Trump-era practices

  Punishment & Society · 2023-03-30 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Recent punishment and society scholarship has addressed the limits of policy reforms aimed at reducing mass incarceration in the U.S. This work has focused in particular on the political dimensions of penal legal reform and policy-making, and the compromises and shortcomings in those processes. Nearly absent in this scholarship, however, has been empirical and theoretical engagement with the role of front-line prosecutors as facilitators and/or resistors to downsizing efforts. Using the case of the U.S. federal criminal legal system's modest efforts to decrease the system's racially disparate and punitive outcomes, this paper elucidates the fragile nature of such reforms by delineating the critical role that front-line prosecutors play in maintaining punitive approaches. Focusing specifically on federal prosecutorial policy and practices in the Trump era, I draw on a subset of data from an interdisciplinary, multi-methodological project set in distinct federal court jurisdictions in the U.S. to examine how front-line prosecutors were able to quickly reverse course on reform through the use of their uniquely powerful charging and plea-bargaining tools. My findings illustrate how federal prosecutors pursued more low-level defendants, and utilized statutory “hammers,” including mandatory minimums and mandatory enhancements to ensure harsh punishments in a swift return to a war-on-crime.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Testing the Impact of Race on Jury Evaluations of Informants

  NSF · $354k · 2016–2019

• Case Adjudication as Local Practice: A Follow-up Study using Multiple Methods

  NSF · $153k · 2019–2021

• Legal change and local norms in federal courts: A qualitative field study of federal case processing and negotiations, post-Booker

  NSF · $105k · 2013–2015

Frequent coauthors

• Craig Haney

  13 shared

• Marisa Omori

  University of Missouri–St. Louis

  6 shared

• Emily V. Shaw

  University of York

  4 shared

• Nicholas Petersen

  3 shared

• Kelly Hannah‐Moffat

  3 shared

• Matt Barno

  University of California, Irvine

  3 shared

• Sofia Laguna

  University of California, Irvine

  2 shared

• Jeannine Bell

  Indiana University Bloomington

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  UC Santa Cruz

Awards & honors

• 2017 Michael J. Hindelang Award by the American Society of C…