When in Rome... on Local Norms and Sentencing Decisions

Abstract

In this paper, we show that sentencing norms vary widely even across geographically close units. By examining North Carolina's unique judicial rotation system, we show that judges arriving in a new court gradually converge to local sentencing norms. We document factors that facilitate this convergence and show that sentencing norms are predicted by preferences of the local constituents. We build on these empirical results to analyze theoretically the delegation trade-off faced by a social planner: the judge can learn the local norm, but only at the cost of potential capture.

Prosecutors, judges and sentencing disparities: Evidence from traffic offenses in France

“…Robustness checks show that unobserved heterogeneity cannot explain differences in terms of sentence severity between courts. Our results are consistent with recent evidence from North Carolina according to which cross-court disparities do not disappear over time with judge rotations, since judges tend to adapt to local norms (Abrams et al, 2021). Second, results from a mediation analysis show that there is some heterogeneity in the role of prosecutors between courts.…”

Electoral Sentencing Cycles

“…In particular the fact that the electoral cycle is only present when the judge is sentencing in her home district, rules out behavioral factors such as stress, as a determinant of the cycle. While other studies (Danziger et al 2011, Chen andPhilippe, 2019) have shown that emotions may affect judicial decisions under particular circumstances, our findings show that rational strategic behavior can explain consistent variation of sentencing over the electoral cycle.…”

“…Appendix A (Online Appendix not for publication) This contains the same material as Appendix E in Abrams et. al.…”

How Common are Electoral Cycles in Criminal Sentencing?

“…In North Carolina, judges are required to rotate across districts, a fact that is exploited in a very nice identification strategy inAbrams, Galbiati, Henry, and Philippe (2019b).…”