Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Cohen, Alma; Yang, Crystal S.
• 署名单位: Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); Harvard University
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-ECONOMIC POLICY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7731
• DOI: 10.1257/pol.20170329
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 160-191
• 关键词: racial disparities; GUIDELINES; COURTS; DISCRETION; STANDARDS; judges; BIAS; RACE

摘要

This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to racial and gender disparities in sentencing using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants to 3.0 more months than similar nonblacks and female defendants to 2.0 fewer months than similar males compared to Democratic-appointed judges, 65 percent of the baseline racial sentence gap and 17 percent of the baseline gender sentence gap, respectively. These differences cannot be explained by other judge characteristics and grow substantially larger when judges are granted more discretion.