Judges’ case outcomes can show racial bias even when judges themselves are unbiased

Evidence

The criminal justice process is lengthy, and it is multilayered. There are a number of key actors—prosecutors, criminal defense attorneys, among others—of which judges are just one. The ultimate decisions made by judges embody the decisions made by these other actors before the case has arrived in front of the judge. This realization poses a challenge to the investigation of judicial bias because it is important to filter out various confounding factors to pinpoint the sources of any potential bias, if it exists, and to design effective public policy to eliminate the bias. Thus, an overarching examination of judicial bias would investigate the actions/decisions of each actor in the judicial system separately, while accounting for the fact that one actor’s decision may impact the decision of another actor, and that these decisions may be interdependent. For example, judges’ decisions may reveal racial bias even when judges themselves are racially unbiased, if it is the case that prosecutors show bias. Alternatively, racially unbiased prosecutors may adjust their behavior in how they handle cases based on the race of the defendant if they recognize that judges are racially biased. Thus, analyses of judicial decision-making need to be statistically sophisticated to account for observable and unobservable factors that determine the judicial decisions under investigation. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 729

Categorization

• QUESTION: The interdependence claim means aggregate measured disparities at the judge level would over-attribute to judges’ personal bias — worth chasing whether any study has decomposed judge vs. prosecutor vs. defense contributions.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s core question about whether measured bias diverges from professed conviction — here, institutional position rather than personal conviction creates apparent bias.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 729