Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions

Abstract

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.

Terrorism, immigration and asylum approval

“…Estimates are not statistically significant across any of the windows around the attacks and the point estimates of the coefficients are quite small. These results are in contrast with recent work by Cohen and Yang (2019) who find that the appointing political party of federal judges influences judge decision making. It is worth emphasizing here, however, that we are measuring differences in judge responses to Sept.…”

Conservative News Media and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Exposure to Fox News Channel

“…Our contribution is that besides the direct behavioral effect on juries through viewing stories about a case, media have an additional effect by changing preferences of voters and exercising electoral pressures on judges. Building on the cross-sectional evidence for a partisan gap in racial sentencing disparities (Cohen and Yang, 2018), our estimates have a causal interpretation for shifts in ideology. The findings are relevant to recent debates on how judges should be selected, retained, and compensated (Epstein, Landes and Posner, 2013;Ash and MacLeod, 2017), along with recent debates on polarization and media regulation (Boxell, Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2017;Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017).…”

“…If judges are apolitical and make their decisions without regard to outside influences, partisan news exposure should have no effect (see, e.g., Posner, 2008;Epstein, Landes and Posner, 2013). But recent empirical work has documented that judges do respond to non-legal influences, political and otherwise (Berdejó and Yuchtman, 2013, Ash and MacLeod, 2015, 2017, Chen, Moskowitz and Shue, 2016, Berdejó and Chen, 2017, and Cohen and Yang, 2018. In addition, there is evidence suggesting that the judiciary has become more conservative over time (e.g., Naidu, 2017, Ash, Chen andLu, 2017).…”

Bias and Judging

“…Second, these differences associated with personal background largely pale in comparison to the findings showing differences according to a judge's party and ideology. The cumulative empirical research is very clear: being a conservative or a liberal (or being appointed by a Republican or a Democrat) is highly predictive of decision-making, and is more predictive than personal demographics across a larger swath of issue areas-including criminal sentencing and civil rights (Cohen and Yang, Forthcoming;Cox and Miles, 2008b).…”