Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles

Abstract

Employing the universe of juvenile court decisions in a US state between 1996 and 2012, we analyze the effects of emotional shocks associated with unexpected outcomes of football games played by a prominent college team in the state. We find that unexpected losses increase sentence lengths assigned by judges during the week following the game. Unexpected wins, or losses that were expected to be close contests ex ante have no impact. The effects of these emotional shocks are asymmetrically borne by black defendants. The impact of upset losses on sentence lengths is larger for defendants if their cases are handled by judges who received their bachelor's degrees from the university with which the football team is affiliated. Different falsification tests and a number of auxiliary analyses demonstrate the robustness of the findings. These results provide evidence for the impact of emotions in one domain on decisions in a completely unrelated domain among a uniformly highly educated group of individuals (judges) who make decisions after deliberation that involve high stakes (sentence lengths). They also point to the existence of a subtle and previously unnoticed capricious application of sentencing. (JEL D83, I23, J13, J15, K42, L83, Z21)

The Influence of Offender Race, Risk Level, and Participant Emotion on Juvenile Probation Case Judgments

“…It is possible that probation officers would not be as susceptible to emotion effects, due to their professional training. However, others have shown emotion influences the judgments of a variety of different types of actors in the criminal justice system including police (Brown & Daus, ; Wooff & Skinns, ), jurors, ( Nuñez, Schweitzer, Chai, & Myers, ; Wiener, Georges, & Cangas, ), and judges making decisions about juveniles (Eren & Mocan, ). We suspect that future studies will show that probation officers making judgments like those that our lay sample made are not immune from the negative consequences of intensified emotions like fear, especially when these emotions are evoked by those that the officers serve.…”

Machine Learning and the Rule of Law

“…Since judges are randomly assigned, judicial characteristics fall into W , because the judge that a litigant randomly draws is not legally relevant to the outcome of a decision. Of course, as mentioned briefly above, there is a substantial literature showing that features in W in fact are predictive of legal outcomes in a variety of settings (Berdejo and Chen 2016;Chen, Moskowitz, and Shue 2016;Schanzenbach 2005;Bushway and Piehl 2001;Mustard 2001;Steffensmeier and Demuth 2000;Albonetti 1997; Thomson and Zingraff 1981;Abrams, Bertrand, and Mullainathan 2012;Boyd, Epstein, and Martin 2010;Shayo and Zussman 2011;Chen and Philippe 2017;Eren and Mocan 2016;Chen and Eagel 2016;Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso 2011;Barry et al 2016;Chen and Yu 2016).…”

“…• Politics and race also appear to influence judicial outcomes (Schanzenbach 2005;Bushway and Piehl 2001;Mustard 2001;Steffensmeier and Demuth 2000;Albonetti 1997; Thomson and Zingraff 1981;Abrams, Bertrand, and Mullainathan 2012;Boyd, Epstein, and Martin 2010;Shayo and Zussman 2011) as does masculinity (Chen, Halberstam, andYu 2016b, 2016a), birthdays (Chen and Philippe 2017), football game outcomes Eren and Mocan 2016), time of day (Chen and Eagel 2016;Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso 2011), weather (Barry et al 2016), name , and shared biographies or dialects (Chen and Yu 2016).…”

Judicial analytics and the great transformation of American Law

“…A recent study by Eren and Mocan (2018) finds that Louisiana judges respond to the Louisiana football team winning or losing. Figure 7 shows the same effect in asylum courts and district courts with a much larger sample.…”