That's the law
The Influence of Public Sentiment on Supreme Court Opinion Clarity
Ryan Black et al.
Law & Society Review, September 2016, Pages 703-732
Abstract:
We examine whether public opinion leads Supreme Court justices to alter the content of their opinions. We argue that when justices anticipate public opposition to their decisions, they write clearer opinions. We develop a novel measure of opinion clarity based on multifaceted textual readability scores, which we validate using human raters. We examine an aggregate time series analysis of the influence of public mood on opinion clarity and an individual-level sample of Supreme Court cases paired with issue-specific public opinion polls. The empirical results from both models show that justices write clearer opinions when their rulings contradict popular sentiment. These results suggest public opinion influences the Court, and suggest that future scholarship should analyze how public opinion influences the written content of decision makers' policies.
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Testing for Racial Discrimination in Police Searches of Motor Vehicles
Camelia Simoiu, Sam Corbett-Davies & Sharad Goel
Stanford Working Paper, July 2016
Abstract:
In the course of conducting traffic stops, officers have discretion to search motorists for drugs, weapons, and other contraband. There is concern that these search decisions are prone to racial bias, but it has proven difficult to rigorously assess claims of discrimination. Here we develop a new statistical method --- the threshold test --- to test for racial discrimination in motor vehicle searches. We use geographic variation in stop outcomes to infer the effective race-specific standards of evidence that officers apply when deciding whom to search, an approach we formalize with a hierarchical Bayesian latent variable model. This technique mitigates the problems of omitted variables and infra-marginality associated with benchmark and outcome tests for discrimination. On a dataset of 4.5 million police stops in North Carolina, we find that the standard for searching black and Hispanic drivers is considerably lower than the standard for searching white and Asian drivers, a pattern that holds consistently across the 100 largest police departments in the state.
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A Punishing Look: Skin Tone and Afrocentric Features in the Halls of Justice
Ryan King & Brian Johnson
American Journal of Sociology, July 2016, Pages 90-124
Abstract:
Two related lines of research have gained traction in the social sciences during the past three decades. One examines the association between race and punishment, while a second investigates stratification and colorism, defined as discrimination based on skin tone. Yet rarely do scholars examine these issues together. The current study uses new data to investigate the association between offender's skin tone, Afrocentric facial features, and criminal punishment. More than 850 booking photos of black and white male offenders in two Minnesota counties were coded and then matched to detailed sentencing records. Results indicate that darker skin tone and Afrocentric facial features are associated with harsher sanctions and that the latter effect is particularly salient for white defendants. The findings add to existing work on skin tone and stratification and suggest that future research should consider other aspects of appearance, such as facial features, in the study of punishment and inequality.
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Do Judges' Characteristics Matter? Ethnicity, Gender, and Partisanship in Texas State Trial Courts
Claire Lim, Bernardo Silveira & James Snyder
American Law and Economics Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We explore how government officials' behavior varies with their ethnicity, gender, and political orientation. Specifically, we analyze criminal sentencing decisions in Texas state district courts using data on approximately half a million criminal cases from 2004 to 2013. We exploit randomized case assignments within counties and obtain precisely estimated effects of judges' ethnicity, gender, and political orientation that are near zero, conditional on geographic factors. However, we find substantial cross-judge heterogeneity in sentencing. Exploiting a unique overlapping structure of Texas state district courts, we find no evidence that this heterogeneity is driven by judges pandering to voters.
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The Economics of Rights: Does the Right to Counsel Increase Crime?
Itai Ater, Yehonatan Givati & Oren Rigbi
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine the broad consequences of the right to counsel by exploiting a legal reform in Israel that extended the right to publicly provided legal counsel to suspects in arrest proceedings. Using the staggered regional rollout of the reform, we find that the reform reduced arrest duration and the likelihood of arrestees being charged. We also find that the reform reduced the number of arrests made by the police. Lastly, we find that the reform increased crime. These findings indicate that the right to counsel improves suspects' situation, but discourages the police from making arrests, which results in higher crime.
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Will Dobbie, Jacob Goldin & Crystal Yang
NBER Working Paper, August 2016
Abstract:
Over 20 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States are currently awaiting trial, but little is known about the impact of pre-trial detention on defendants. This paper uses the detention tendencies of quasi-randomly assigned bail judges to estimate the causal effects of pre-trial detention on subsequent defendant outcomes. Using data from administrative court and tax records, we find that being detained before trial significantly increases the probability of a conviction, primarily through an increase in guilty pleas. Pre-trial detention has no detectable effect on future crime, but decreases pre-trial crime and failures to appear in court. We also find suggestive evidence that pre-trial detention decreases formal sector employment and the receipt of employment- and tax-related government benefits. We argue that these results are consistent with (i) pre-trial detention weakening defendants' bargaining position during plea negotiations, and (ii) a criminal conviction lowering defendants' prospects in the formal labor market.
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The Downstream Consequences of Misdemeanor Pretrial Detention
Paul Heaton, Sandra Mayson & Megan Stevenson
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, July 2016
Abstract:
In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce otherwise innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error in case adjudication. While practitioners have long recognized this possibility, empirical evidence on the downstream impacts of pretrial detention on misdemeanor defendants and their cases remains limited. This Article uses detailed data on hundreds of thousands of misdemeanor cases resolved in Harris County, Texas - the third largest county in the U.S. - to measure the effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes and future crime. We find that detained defendants are 25% more likely than similarly situated releases to plead guilty, 43% more likely to be sentenced to jail, and receive jail sentences that are more than twice as long on average. Furthermore, those detained pretrial are more likely to commit future crime, suggesting that detention may have a criminogenic effect. These differences persist even after fully controlling for the initial bail amount as well as detailed offense, demographic, and criminal history characteristics. Use of more limited sets of controls, as in prior research, overstates the adverse impacts of detention. A quasi-experimental analysis based upon case timing confirms that these differences likely reflect the casual effect of detention. These results raise important constitutional questions, and suggest that Harris County could save millions of dollars a year, increase public safety, and reduce wrongful convictions with better pretrial release policy.
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Distortion of Justice: How the Inability to Pay Bail Affects Case Outcomes
Megan Stevenson
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, May 2016
Abstract:
Instrumenting for detention status with the bail-setting propensities of rotating magistrates I find that pretrial detention leads to a 13% increase in the likelihood of being convicted, an effect explained by an increase in guilty pleas among defendants who otherwise would have been acquitted or had their charges dropped. On average, those detained will be liable for $128 more in court fees and will receive incarceration sentences that are almost five months longer. Effects can be seen in both misdemeanor and felony cases, across age and race, and appear particularly large for first or second time arrestees. Case types where evidence tends to be weaker also show pronounced effects: a 30% increase in pleading guilty and an additional 18 months in the incarceration sentence. While previous research has shown correlations between pretrial detention and unfavorable case outcomes, this paper is the first to use a quasi-experimental research design to show that the relationship is causal.
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Tina Zottoli et al.
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, August 2016, Pages 250-259
Abstract:
The overwhelming majority of criminal cases are resolved by a guilty plea. Concerns have been raised about the potential for plea bargaining to be coercive, but little is known about the actual choices faced by defendants who plead guilty. Through interviews of youth and adults who pleaded guilty to felonies in New York City, we found that substantial discounts were offered to participants in exchange for their guilty pleas and that a sizable portion of both the youth and adults claimed either that they were completely innocent (27% and 19%, respectively) or that they were not guilty of what they were charged with (20% and 41%, respectively). Participants also reported infrequent contact with their attorneys prior to accepting their plea deals and very short time periods in which to make their decisions. Our findings suggest the plea-bargaining system in New York City may be fraught with promises of leniency, time pressures, and insufficient attorney advisement-factors that may undermine the voluntariness of plea deal decisions for some defendants.
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From Bail to Jail: The Effect of Jail Capacity on Bail Decisions
Marian Williams
American Journal of Criminal Justice, September 2016, Pages 484-497
Abstract:
One of the more important decisions made by judges in the criminal justice system is the bail decision. Factors that judges take into consideration when making a bail decision, such as seriousness of the offense, flight risk, and public safety, are typically seen by researchers as the primary determinants of such a decision. However, one aspect that researchers have not studied extensively - rated jail capacity - could play an important role in a judge's decision. Overcrowding in jails leads to numerous problems, both for the offender and the system itself, so judges may be more willing to release offenders into the community during the pretrial period if the local jails are overcrowded. The current study examines the effect of rated jail capacity on decisions regarding bail amounts, release on recognizance (ROR), financial release, and conditional release in eight Florida counties. Results indicate that rated jail capacity plays a role in judges' bail decisions, suggesting that judges are concerned about housing more pretrial offenders in crowded jails.
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Mike Morrison, Amanda DeVaul-Fetters & Bertram Gawronski
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, August 2016, Pages 1129-1141
Abstract:
Most legal systems are based on the premise that defendants are treated as innocent until proven guilty and that decisions will be unbiased and solely based on the facts of the case. The validity of this assumption has been questioned for cases involving racial minority members, in that racial bias among jury members may influence jury decisions. The current research shows that legal professionals are adept at identifying jurors with levels of implicit race bias that are consistent with their legal interests. Using a simulated voir dire, professionals assigned to the role of defense lawyer for a Black defendant were more likely to exclude jurors with high levels of implicit race bias, whereas prosecutors of a Black defendant did the opposite. There was no relation between professionals' peremptory challenges and jurors' levels of explicit race bias. Implications for the role of racial bias in legal decision making are discussed.
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The Role of Emotional Language in Briefs before the US Supreme Court
Ryan Black et al.
Journal of Law and Courts, Fall 2016, Pages 377-407
Abstract:
The legal brief is a primary vehicle by which lawyers seek to persuade appellate judges. Despite wide acceptance that briefs are important, empirical scholarship has yet to establish their influence on the Supreme Court or fully explore justices' preferences regarding them. We argue that emotional language conveys a lack of credibility to justices and thereby diminishes the party's likelihood of garnering justices' votes. The data concur. Using an automated textual analysis program, we find that parties who employ less emotional language in their briefs are more likely to win a justice's vote, a result that holds even after controlling for other features correlated with success, such as case quality. These findings suggest that advocates seeking to influence judges can enhance their credibility and attract justices' votes by employing measured, objective language.
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Susanne Schmittat & Birte Englich
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, forthcoming
Abstract:
Fair and well justified judicial decisions require that judges evaluate and interpret all relevant facts. However, heuristics and other shortcuts are used here as well. Additionally, it has been demonstrated that experts may be subject to the same decision biases as laypeople. Therefore, we investigated whether and to what extent judicial experts are protected against confirmatory information processing (CIP), a tendency to seek out (selective exposure) and evaluate information more positively (biased assimilation) when it confirms one's own preliminary decision. Results indicate that legal experts (judges, prosecutors, and defense-lawyers) evaluated information supporting their preliminary decision more positively than conflicting information. However, there is a clear expertise effect: domain-specific experts (e.g., criminal-law experts deciding a criminal-law case) showed less CIP than general experts (legal professionals with specializations in other fields than criminal-law), who did not differ from laypeople (pilot study). We further investigated whether either decision-certainty, knowledge, or a feeling of responsibility can be identified as potential underlying mechanism of this expertise effect. Higher decision-certainty or prior knowledge did not correlate with CIP (pilot study). In our main study, general experts significantly reduced their CIP to the same level as domain-specific experts if we induced responsibility. Without this induction general experts again showed more CIP than domain-specific experts. This implies a motivational explanation for the lower CIP in domain-specific experts. The advantage of specialized judges over general judges will be discussed.
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Tara Richards et al.
Women & Criminal Justice, Summer 2016, Pages 260-280
Abstract:
The relatively small body of prior research investigating whether the sex composition of juries impacts sentencing decisions has produced equivocal results. Exploring this topic further, the current study used a large sample of capital cases from North Carolina (n = 675) to examine (a) whether jury sex composition predicted jury capital punishment sentencing decisions; and (b) whether there were different models of sentencing for male-majority, equal male-female, and female-majority juries. When we controlled for a number of legal and extralegal factors, our findings indicated that jury sex composition was independently related to sentencing outcomes. Specifically, equal male-female juries were significantly more likely and female-majority juries were significantly less likely to choose the death penalty versus a sentence of life in prison. In addition, different models (predictors) of sentencing were revealed for each of the jury sex compositions. Implications for future research and policy are discussed.
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Stress, stress-induced cortisol responses, and eyewitness identification performance
Melanie Sauerland et al.
Behavioral Sciences & the Law, July/August 2016, Pages 580-594
Abstract:
In the eyewitness identification literature, stress and arousal at the time of encoding are considered to adversely influence identification performance. This assumption is in contrast with findings from the neurobiology field of learning and memory, showing that stress and stress hormones are critically involved in forming enduring memories. This discrepancy may be related to methodological differences between the two fields of research, such as the tendency for immediate testing or the use of very short (1-2 hours) retention intervals in eyewitness research, while neurobiology studies insert at least 24 hours. Other differences refer to the extent to which stress-responsive systems (i.e., the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) are stimulated effectively under laboratory conditions. The aim of the current study was to conduct an experiment that accounts for the contemporary state of knowledge in both fields. In all, 123 participants witnessed a live staged theft while being exposed to a laboratory stressor that reliably elicits autonomic and glucocorticoid stress responses or while performing a control task. Salivary cortisol levels were measured to control for the effectiveness of the stress induction. One week later, participants attempted to identify the thief from target-present and target-absent line-ups. According to regression and receiver operating characteristic analyses, stress did not have robust detrimental effects on identification performance.
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Christi Metcalfe
Law & Society Review, September 2016, Pages 637-673
Abstract:
While pleading guilty has become ubiquitous in criminal trial courts, limited research has focused on the plea process and the factors that influence guilty plea convictions. Numerous theoretical accounts of the plea process highlight the importance of the court actors and their interactions. Based on this research, the current study analyzes the impact of courtroom actor familiarity and similarity on the chosen mode of disposition and the time to disposition. The findings demonstrate that similarity among the actors and familiarity between the prosecutor and judge increase the odds of a plea disposition and reduce the days to disposition. However, familiarity of the defense attorney seems to impede on the informal plea process, such that cases are more likely to proceed to trial when the defense attorney is more familiar with the other actors.
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Complicating Race: Afrocentric Facial Feature Bias and Prison Sentencing in Oregon
Amanda Petersen
Race and Justice, forthcoming
Abstract:
Much research on race and sentencing utilizes broad racial categories to estimate the effect of race on sentencing outcomes; however, more nuanced conceptualizations of race have begun to appear in the literature. Specifically, a small but growing body of literature has assessed the role of discrimination based on Black stereotypicality of facial features, or Afrocentric facial feature bias, on sentencing outcomes for convicted males. By using Department of Corrections data from Black females and males incarcerated in Oregon, paired with experimentally derived facial feature ratings, this study extends past research by conducting both sex and race analyses in a new locale. These analyses are theoretically contextualized in feature-trait stereotyping and the focal concerns perspective - two previously unrelated literatures. The regression of sentence length on Afrocentric facial features, other extralegal factors, and legally relevant factors suggests that Afrocentric facial features do not explain sentence length for females. Afrocentricity predicts sentence length for males in the univariate and extralegal models, but significance is diminished with the inclusion of legally relevant variables. In interactional models, the sentence lengths of Black females and males do not vary in relation to one another either before or after the inclusion of legal factors. These findings are discussed in light of sentencing mechanisms in the state of Oregon, possible stereotype bias at earlier stages in the court process, and the racialized nature of offense histories and seriousness ratings.
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Americans' Knowledge of Their Local Judges
Mark Jonathan McKenzie et al.
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
What do Americans know about their local judges and how do they know it? One of the central arguments in the debate over judicial elections is whether voters know enough about judicial candidates to make an informed democratic choice. The vast majority of criminal and civil matters in the U.S. begin with and filter through the local state courts. But judicial scholars know little about what explains the variance in voters' knowledge of their courts and judges. This paper draws on survey data from the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to investigate the origins of voter knowledge of local judges. A central finding of this study is that rural voters are a lot more knowledgeable about their local judges than are urban voters, ceteris paribus. This finding has significant consequences for the debate over the ways in which states structure their elections for local judges.
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Informal, Inquisitorial, and Accurate: An Empirical Look at a Problem-Solving Housing Court
Jessica Steinberg
Law & Social Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Substantive justice is often seen as elusive in courts dominated by low-income individuals. Complex court rules, coupled with pervasive lack of counsel, can make it difficult for the traditional adversary process to identify and redress legitimate grievances. This article takes on the social problem of substandard housing and examines whether inquisitorial procedure has the potential to produce accurate outcomes in a tribunal dominated by the unrepresented. Relying on in-court observations of nearly 300 hearings, and a longitudinal review of nearly seventy-five cases, this article surfaces the regularized procedures utilized by a purported "problem-solving" housing court, and theorizes that the inquisitorial features of judicially controlled investigation and enforcement may motivate landlords to repair substantiated housing code violations. This article adds nuance to our understanding of informal justice by identifying the hidden procedural formalisms that may guide alternative decision-making processes. Furthermore, it evaluates the relationship of one iteration of experimental formalism to substantive justice, and suggests that inquisitorial procedures may be correlated with improved accuracy in case outcomes.
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Ecological Contributors to Disparities in Bond Amounts and Pretrial Detention
John Wooldredge, James Frank & Natalie Goulette
Crime & Delinquency, forthcoming
Abstract:
Pretrial dispositions have been receiving greater attention in the literature on extralegal disparities in criminal case processing. We examined the relevance of areas in which crimes are committed for court decisions regarding bond amounts and whether suspects are ultimately detained prior to trial. A random sample of 2,677 persons charged with felony crimes committed in 820 blocks of a major urban U.S. jurisdiction was examined, with separate analyses of property, violent, and drug offenses. Defendants were more likely to be held in jail prior to trial when crimes were committed in more disadvantaged neighborhoods (higher percentages of female-headed households, vacant residences, renters, and African Americans). However, the odds of pretrial detention were also higher for defendants accused of crimes in less disadvantaged neighborhoods relative to their own. Evidence favors neighborhood composition as an important contributor to disparities in pretrial detention beyond individual factors such as a defendant's race.
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Measuring Judicial Ideology Using Clerk Hiring
Adam Bonica et al.
Stanford Working Paper, July 2016
Abstract:
We present a new measure of judicial ideology based on judicial hiring behavior. Specifically, we utilize the ideology of the law clerks hired by federal judges to estimate the ideology of the judges themselves. These Clerk-Based Ideology (CBI) scores complement existing measures of judicial ideology in several ways. First, CBI scores can be estimated for judges across the federal judicial hierarchy. Second, CBI scores can capture temporal changes in ideology. Third, CBI scores avoid case selection and strategic behavior concerns that plague existing vote-based measures. We illustrate the promise of CBI scores through a number of applications.
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David Hyman et al.
University of Illinois Working Paper, June 2016
Abstract:
How concentrated is the market for medical malpractice ("med mal") legal representation? Do successful plaintiffs' lawyers start off with better cases to begin with, do they add more value to the cases they handle, or both? How do top plaintiffs' lawyers market their services, and where did they go to school? How large are the "wages of risk" -the compensation to plaintiffs' lawyers for working on contingency? How often do plaintiffs proceed pro se, and with what results? We address these questions using a dataset of every insured med mal case closed in Illinois during 2000-2010. We show that most plaintiffs have a lawyer. We quantify the market share, case mix, and amount recovered by the 1,317 law firms that handled med mal cases in our sample, stratify firms into four tiers, and assess differences across tiers. We find that the market for plaintiff-side med mal representation is both un-concentrated and highly stratified. At all firms, a small number of cases account for a heavily disproportionate share of total recoveries. We use the extensive covariates in our data to (imperfectly) address sample selection, and estimate the effect of having a lawyer and of law firm tier on outcomes. Controlling for observable claim characteristics, having a lawyer predicts large increases in the probability of prevailing and expected recovery. Higher-tier firms have only modestly higher success rates, but substantially higher expected recoveries. However, the differences shrink and are statistically insignificant when we compare top tier to second tier firms. This suggests that there are substantial benefits to having a lawyer -- and a higher tier lawyer -- but diminishing marginal returns at the top of the market. Assuming that there is some unobserved case selection, our findings provide a plausible upper bound on the "value-added" by different tiers of plaintiffs' lawyers.