Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions

Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions∗

Racial and gender disparities are prevalent in the criminal justice system, but the sources of these disparities remain largely unknown. This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to these disparities using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican appointed judges sentence black de...

Money in Judicial Politics: Individual Contributions and Collective Decisions∗

We study how campaign contributions affect the voting strategies and effectiveness of justices in the Supreme Court of eight US states. A judge’s voting strategy leans more heavily towards an interest group the larger are its contributions to the judge, and the smaller are its contributions to other members of the court. This panel effect is consistent with an equilibrium response to contributi...

Judicial Fact-Finding at Sentencing

Judicial Attributes and Sentencing - Deviation Cases : Do Sex , Race , and Politics Matter ?

Most scholars focus on whether the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines effectively constrain judges or result in disparate decisions based on a court’s or defendant’s location. With few exceptions, studies of the effect of judicial attributes on federal-district-court-sentencing cases have been stymied by the United States Sentencing Commission’s refusal to release judges’ names in their databases of se...

Sentencing guidelines, judicial discretion and plea bargaining

The United States Sentencing Commission was created to develop federal sentencing guidelines, which restrict judicial discretion and were found to increase the average sentence length while leaving unchanged the likelihood of resolution through plea bargaining. A game theoretic model is developed in which a sentencing commission may impose guidelines or defer to judicial discretion; then a defe...