Judge mood and hunger can cause arbitrary sentencing that awareness might correct

Evidence

These results are significant because they document that judicial decisions can be arbitrary and capricious, depending on the mood of the judge, or depending on whether the judge feels generous toward a defendant for a reason that is irrelevant to the case. The added layer that emerges in the paper by Eren and Mocan (2018) is the existence of implicit bias, which surfaces when the judge is exposed to an emotional trauma. The potential good news here is that making this information available to judges could alter their behavior. Specifically, if judges recognize that their propensity to punish increases following a negative emotional shock or when they get tired and hungry, they may take this information into account in their subsequent adjudications and may adjust their instinct-based decisions. Similarly, if judges are made aware that “rewarding” a defendant based on his/her birthday or based on some other custom or celebration (e.g., a trial coinciding with a national or religious holiday) generates arbitrary disparities in sentencing between defendants, they may correct this behavior. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 757

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: A possible essay angle: ‘feeding judges before rulings’ — the mundane, fixable causes of arbitrary justice, from hunger to birthdays to holidays, and whether transparency alone can debias them.
• XREF: Connects to the broader behavioral-bias literature in the book’s earlier chapters on implicit bias and to Kahneman’s ‘thinking fast and slow’ systems of judgment.

Related

• Judge sentencing shifts with mood, fatigue, hunger, and emotional trauma. (similarity 0.93)
• Random emotional shocks to judges produce arbitrary punishment decisions. (similarity 0.80)