Criminal defense attorneys are overlooked as contributors to racial bias in sentencing

Evidence

African Americans are dramatically overrepresented in the U.S. criminal justice system (CJS) (Burke & Leben, 2007), and they are more than four times as likely to be incarcerated as Whites (Wagner, 2012). This disparity— and the bias that drives it—is often laid at the feet of police and prosecutors (see Correll et al., 2007; Kutateladze, Andiloro, & Johnson, 2016). Indeed, in other chapters of this book, the authors note that there are good reasons for placing at least some of the blame on these actors. But we write “some” blame because another actor is typically elided in the discussion of bias: criminal defense attorneys. On the one hand, this elision is surprising because, given that most criminal cases resolve through plea bargaining (see Pastore & Maguire, 2003), criminal defense attorneys play a significant role in case outcomes. On the other hand, it is not so surprising because criminal defense attorneys are working on behalf of defendants, and it seems counterintuitive to believe that they would harm their own clients. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 664

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s core interest in the sincere-conviction-vs-measured-bias gap: defense attorneys who are egalitarian and on their clients’ side still show bias — a professional-context instance of professed conviction diverging from measured bias.
• SEED: An essay angle on how institutions assign blame for racial disparity to adversarial actors (police, prosecutors) while exonerating the sympathetic actor (defense counsel) — structurally similar to how moral-panic and scapegoat narratives allocate blame.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 664