Individual judges vary widely in how they sentence minority versus white defendants

Evidence

Specifically, studies that analyze judicial decisions as a function of case characteristics and defendant attributes implicitly assume that judges are homogenous in their treatment of race. This is, of course, a strong assumption, and it is shown not to be true. For example, Abrams, Bertrand, and Mullainathan (2012) analyzed case files from the Circuit Court of Cook County in Illinois. Exploiting random assignment of cases to judges, they detected significant variation between judges in how they sentence minority defendants. The authors found that there was substantial inter-judge variation in incarceration rates, but not in sentence lengths. For example when moving from a judge at the 10th percentile to a judge at the 90th percentile in the racial gap distribution, the gap in incarceration rates between Black and White defendants increases by 18 percentage points (where the mean incarceration rates of Black and White defendants are 38 percent and 51 percent, respectively). This indicates that some judges systematically convict Black defendants at higher rates, and some other judges do the opposite. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 745

Specifically, studies that analyze judicial decisions as a function of case characteristics and defendant attributes implicitly assume that judges are homogenous in their treatment of race. This is, of course, a strong assumption, and it is shown not to be true. For example, Abrams, Bertrand, and Mullainathan (2012) analyzed case files from the Circuit Court of Cook County in Illinois. Exploiting random assignment of cases to judges, they detected significant variation between judges in how they sentence minority defendants. The authors found that there was substantial inter-judge variation in incarceration rates, but not in sentence lengths. For example when moving from a judge at the 10th percentile to a judge at the 90th percentile in the racial gap distribution, the gap in incarceration rates between Black and White defendants increases by 18 percentage points (where the mean incarceration rates of Black and White defendants are 38 percent and 51 percent, respectively). This indicates that some judges systematically convict Black defendants at higher rates, and some other judges do the opposite. Thus, substantially different probabilities of incarceration emerge for a Black defendant, depending on the judge to whom the case is assigned. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 745

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the book’s overarching bias-in-law thesis; the inter-judge variation finding parallels behavioral economics’ ‘person effects’ and Kahneman’s noise research.
• 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…, 745