Judicial race and gender affect case outcomes, making bench diversity a remedy for bias

Evidence

In chapter 6, Mocan discusses judicial bias. In spite of the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC, grandly bears the words “Equal Justice Under Law,” research shows that defendants’ race impacts case outcomes, even when holding constant the factors that should matter for case adjudication. This means that two similarly situated defendants, charged for the same crime and having the same mitigating or aggregating circumstances, face different probabilities of conviction and receive different sentences—on account of their different races. Moreover, judges’ attributes, such as race, gender, and political affiliation, impact how they decide cases. Mocan provides a host of possible solutions to judicial bias, and he also argues that this latter point might actually show the way forward: to the extent that judges’ attributes, experiences, and backgrounds impact their rulings, then diversity on the bench could very well improve outcomes for minority defendants. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 33

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does the diversity-remedies-bias argument hold up empirically? Could test against studies of whether minority judges actually decide differently; the claim that judge attributes matter both causes the problem and offers the fix.
• SEED: Angle: judicial diversity as an empirical intervention rather than a symbolic gesture — the counterintuitive case that a judge’s identity is a mechanism for fixing unequal outcomes.
• XREF: connects to: Judge attractiveness bias measurably reduces real-world fines and bail amounts — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,…, 92