TY - JOUR
T1 - Judicial politics and sentencing decisions
AU - Cohen, Alma
AU - Yang, Crystal S.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 American Economic Association.
PY - 2019/2/1
Y1 - 2019/2/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85061928613&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1257/pol.20170329
DO - 10.1257/pol.20170329
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AN - SCOPUS:85061928613
SN - 1945-7731
VL - 11
SP - 160
EP - 191
JO - American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
JF - American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
IS - 1
ER -