It is so ordered
How Dark Is Dark? Bright Lights, Big City, Racial Profiling
William Horrace & Shawn Rohlin
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Grogger and Ridgeway (2006) use the Daylight Savings Time shift to develop a police racial profiling test that is based on differences in driver race visibility and (hence) the race distribution of traffic stops across daylight and darkness. However, urban environments may be well-lit at night, eroding the power of their test. We refine their test using streetlight location data in Syracuse, NY, and the results change in the direction of finding profiling of black drivers. Our preferred specification suggests that the odds of a black driver being stopped (relative to nonblack drivers) increase 15% in daylight, compared to darkness.
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Race, law, and health: Examination of ‘Stand Your Ground’ and defendant convictions in Florida
Nicole Ackermann et al.
Social Science & Medicine, October 2015, Pages 194–201
Abstract:
Previous analyses of Stand Your Ground (SYG) cases have been primarily descriptive. We examine the relationship between race of the victim and conviction of the defendant in SYG cases in Florida from 2005-2013. Using a regression analytic approach, we allow for simultaneous examination of multiple factors to better understand existing interrelationships. Data was obtained from the Tampa Bay Times SYG database (237 cases) which was supplemented with available online court documents and/or news reports. After excluding cases which were still pending as of January 2015; had multiple outcomes (because of multiple suspects); and missing information on race of victim and weapon of victim, our final analytic sample has 204 cases. We chose whether the case resulted in a conviction as the outcome. We develop logistic regression models using significant bivariate predictors as candidates. These include race of the victim (White, non-White), whether the defendant could have retreated from the situation, whether the defendant pursued the victim, if the victim was unarmed, and who was the initiator of the confrontation. We find race of the victim to be a significant predictor of case outcome in this data set. After controlling for other variables, the defendant is two times (OR=2.1, 95% CI [1.07, 4.10]) more likely to be convicted in a case that involves White victims compared to those involving non-White victims. Our results depict a disturbing message: SYG legislation in Florida has a quantifiable racial bias that reveals a leniency in convictions if the victim is non-White, which provides evidence towards unequal treatment under the law. Rather than attempting to hide the outcomes of these laws, as was done in Florida, other states with SYG laws should carry out similar analyses to see if their manifestations are the same as those in Florida, and all should remediate any injustices found.
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Skin Color and the Criminal Justice System: Beyond Black-White Disparities in Sentencing
Traci Burch
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, September 2015, Pages 395–420
Abstract:
This article analyzes sentencing outcomes for black and white men in Georgia. The analysis uses sentencing data collected by the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC). Among first-time offenders, both the race-only models and race and skin color models estimate that, on average, blacks receive sentences that are 4.25 percent higher than those of whites even after controlling for legally-relevant factors such as the type of crime. However, the skin color model also shows us that this figure hides important intraracial differences in sentence length: while medium- and dark-skinned blacks receive sentences that are about 4.8 percent higher than those of whites, lighter-skinned blacks receive sentences that are not statistically significantly different from those of whites. After controlling for socioeconomic status in the race-only and race and skin color models the remaining difference between whites and dark- and medium-skinned blacks increases slightly, to 5.5 percent. These findings are discussed with respect to the implications for public policy and for racial hierarchy in the United States.
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Lost Proof of Innocence: The Impact of Confessions on Alibi Witnesses
Stéphanie Marion et al.
Law and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present study investigated how alibi witnesses react in the face of an innocent suspect’s confession. Under the pretext of a problem-solving study, a participant and confederate completed a series of tasks in the same testing room. The confederate was subsequently accused of stealing money from an adjacent office during the study session. After initially corroborating the innocent confederate’s alibi that she never left the testing room, only 45% of participants maintained their support of that alibi once informed that the confederate had confessed (vs. 95% when participants believed the confederate had denied involvement). Even fewer (20%) maintained their corroboration when the experimenter insinuated that their support of the alibi might imply their complicity. The presence of a confession also decreased participants’ confidence in the accuracy of the alibi and their belief in the confederate’s innocence. These findings suggest that a police-induced confession can strip an innocent confessor of a vital source of exculpatory evidence. This effect may well explain the often-puzzling absence of exculpatory evidence in many cases involving wrongful conviction.
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Sentenced to Pretrial Detention: A Study of Bail Decisions and Outcomes
Meghan Sacks, Vincenzo Sainato & Alissa Ackerman
American Journal of Criminal Justice, September 2015, Pages 661-681
Abstract:
Previous research on bail practices has shown that both legal factors, such as offense severity and prior criminal record, and demographic factors such as race and age, exert a strong influence on bail decisions and outcomes. Using a novel application of Knowledge Discovery statistical methods, Bayesian probability analytics, this study utilized a sample of (n = 975) cases collected by New Jersey’s Criminal Disposition Commission, followed from arrest through disposition, to examine bail decisions made by judges and subsequent bail outcomes, i.e., whether defendant was able to meet financial bail requirements to secure release from jail. We found the following: Black and Hispanic defendants are more likely than their white counterparts to have to pay a financial bail requirement; modest differences between races with regards to bail amount set by the court; and that minority defendants, and especially Hispanic defendants, are at a disadvantage when it comes to being able to post bail and they are therefore much more likely than their white counterparts to be held in pretrial detention.
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How Judicial Identity Changes the Text of Legal Rulings
Michael Gill & Andrew Hall
Harvard Working Paper, June 2015
Abstract:
In the common-law tradition, word-usage in legal documents matters because of the principle of stare decisis, the doctrine that requires judges to read and interpret previous rulings relevant to the case at hand. Yet we understand very little of how legal authorities actually write legal texts. We analyze 22,773 cases from the United States Courts of Appeals, and we show how judicial identity affects the text of the written case rulings. We demonstrate that the random assignment of a female judge or of a non-white judge to U.S. Appellate Court panels causes systematic changes in the frequencies with which specific, legally-important words appear in the final ruling, along with the rates at which constitutional amendments and landmark Supreme Court cases are cited. Panels present different arguments — and thus leave a different legacy for future jurists to interpret — depending on the identity of the judges chosen by lot to preside over the case at hand.
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Trailblazers and Those That Followed: Personal Experiences, Gender, and Judicial Empathy
Laura Moyer & Susan Haire
Law & Society Review, September 2015, Pages 665–689
Abstract:
This article investigates one causal mechanism that may explain why female judges on the federal appellate courts are more likely than men to side with plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases. To test whether personal experiences with inequality are related to empathetic responses to the claims of female plaintiffs, we focus on the first wave of female judges, who attended law school during a time of severe gender inequality. We find that female judges are more likely than their male colleagues to support plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases, but that this difference is seen only in judges who graduated law school between 1954 and 1975 and disappears when more recent law school cohorts of men and women judges are compared. These results suggest that the effect of gender as a trait is tied to the role of formative experiences with discrimination.
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Robert Erikson
Columbia University Working Paper, July 2015
Abstract:
The random assignment of judges in the US Appellate Courts has been underutilized in the study of court panel effects. The present study treats case assignment in the US Appellate Courts as a natural experiment, testing for panel effects of female judges in Title VII sex discrimination cases, comparing the votes of male fellow-panelists when the treatment judge is a female with the votes of fellow-panelists of the control judges who are male and of the same party as the female judge. All comparisons are within the same circuit and within the same two-year time window. The paper finds support for strong panel effects - that female judges influence the votes of male judges to be more liberal on sex discrimination cases.
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Does Public Financing Affect Judicial Behavior? Evidence From the North Carolina Supreme Court
Morgan Hazelton, Jacob Montgomery & Brendan Nyhan
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many observers are concerned that campaign contributions could affect the decisions of elected judges. However, the empirical correlation between contributions and judicial decisions is consistent with two different explanations of judicial behavior: (a) money influences judges or (b) contributors choose to support candidates with a similar philosophical or legal perspective. In this article, we take advantage of North Carolina’s shift to a voluntary public finance system for state Supreme Court candidates to obtain more credible estimates of the contributions–behavior relationship. Applying a difference-in-differences research design, we provide evidence that justices who opted into public financing became relatively less favorable toward attorney donors. We also find partial support for our hypothesis that participating justices became more moderate in their voting patterns. Taken together, these findings suggest that public financing reduced responsiveness to donors among participating justices.
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Rob Tillyer & Charles Klahm
Criminal Justice Review, September 2015, Pages 378-396
Purpose: The current study examines whether a police officer’s decision to initiate a discretionary search is impacted by the presence of passengers. It also explores whether groups of minority citizens experience more frequent discretionary searches compared with other groups. These hypotheses are built on the theoretical foundation of officer suspicion, the group hazard hypothesis, the principles of symbolic interactionism, and Black’s theory of law.
Methods: Traffic stop data from a large, urban city are used to test these hypotheses. Multilevel, Bernoulli models are estimated to reflect the nested nature of the data. Data are analyzed in multiple ways to reflect the complex elements of police–citizen encounters.
Results: Results indicate that discretionary searches of a citizen are more likely when a passenger is present. While some group effects are also documented, minority groups are not more likely to be searched such that the presence of passengers appears to supersede the impact of race/ethnicity.
Conclusions: The presence of passengers during a police–citizen encounter has a substantial impact on the likelihood of a discretionary search. Race/ethnicity effects are limited to single-occupant drivers.
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Heather Flowe et al.
Memory, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examined the influence of alcohol on remembering an interactive hypothetical sexual assault scenario in the laboratory using a balanced placebo design. Female participants completed a memory test 24 hours and 4 months later. Participants reported less information (i.e., responded “don't know” more often to questions) if they were under the influence of alcohol during scenario encoding. The accuracy of the information intoxicated participants reported did not differ compared to sober participants, however, suggesting intoxicated participants were effectively monitoring the accuracy of their memory at test. Additionally, peripheral details were remembered less accurately than central details, regardless of the intoxication level; and memory accuracy for peripheral details decreased by a larger amount compared to central details across the retention interval. Finally, participants were more accurate if they were told they were drinking alcohol rather than a placebo. We discuss theoretical implications for alcohol myopia and memory regulation, together with applied implications for interviewing intoxicated witnesses.
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“Too Many Notes”? An Empirical Study of Advocacy in Federal Appeals
Gregory Sisk & Michael Heise
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, September 2015, Pages 578–600
Abstract:
The warp and woof of U.S. law are threaded by the appellate courts, generating precedents on constitutional provisions, statutory texts, and common-law doctrines. Although the product of the appellate courts is regularly the subject of empirical study, less attention has been given to the sources and methods of appellate advocacy. Given the paramount place of written briefs in the appellate process, we should examine seriously the frequent complaint by appellate judges that briefs are too long and that prolixity weakens persuasive power. In a study of civil appeals in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, we discover that, for appellants, briefs of greater length are strongly correlated with success on appeal. For the party challenging an adverse decision below, persuasive completeness may be more important than condensed succinctness. The underlying cause of both greater appellant success and accompanying longer briefs may lie in the typically complex nature of the reversible civil appeal. In light of our findings, the current proposal to reduce the limits on number of words in federal appellate briefs may cut more sharply against appellants. Experienced appellate advocates submit that familiarity with appellate courts, the honed ability to craft the right arguments with the appropriate style in briefing, and expertise in navigating the appellate system provide superior legal representation to clients. Our study lends support to this claim. We found a positive correlation between success and experience for lawyers representing appellees, thus warranting further study of lawyer specialization.
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US Supreme Court Law Clerks as Information Sources
Christopher Kromphardt
Journal of Law and Courts, September 2015, Pages 277-304
Abstract:
Justices use information from attorneys, amici, and the solicitor general to learn about cases. One source that has gone with little empirical scrutiny is their law clerks. I validate a measure of clerk preferences and analyze the role of information conveyed by clerks in shaping the justices’ votes on the merits. I report asymmetric support for the theory that clerks get what they want when they craft credible signals: the results support the conclusion that conservative clerks can influence vote direction. These findings bolster understanding of the role of information in hierarchical relationships and shine light on clerks’ roles.
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Rebecca Sandefur
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Lawyers keep the gates of public justice institutions, particularly through their roles in formal procedures like hearings and trials. Yet, it is not clear what lawyers do in such quintessentially legal settings: conclusions from past research are bedeviled by a lack of clear theory and inconsistencies in research design. Conceptualizing litigation work in terms of professional expertise, I conduct a theoretically grounded synthesis of the findings of extant studies of lawyers’ impact on civil case outcomes. Using an innovative combination of statistical techniques — meta-analysis and nonparametric bounding — the present study transcends previous work to reveal a domain of consensus for lawyers’ effect on case outcomes and to explore why this effect varies so greatly across past studies. For the types of cases researched to date, knowledge of substantive law explains surprisingly little of lawyers’ advantage compared to lay people appearing unrepresented. Instead, lawyers’ impact is greatest when they assist in navigating relatively simple (to lawyers) procedures and where their relational expertise helps courts follow their own rules. Findings for law generalize to other professions, where substantive and relational expertise may shape the conduct and consequences of professional work.
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Assessing the Impact of Mexican Nativity on Sentence Length
Erin Orrick & Alex Piquero
Criminal Justice Policy Review, October 2015, Pages 643-664
Abstract:
Discussions about race/ethnicity and crime are controversial and not surprisingly, such controversies have extended to the immigration–crime link as well. The emerging quantitative knowledge base on this relationship however suggests that immigrant status may actually serve as a protective factor against (serious) criminal involvement. Largely absent from this line of research has been a consideration of how immigrant status, especially Mexican nativity, is related to criminal justice sentencing decisions. In this article, we use data from more than 12,000 U.S. state and federal prisoners to examine sentence length disparities between Mexican- and native-born citizens. Our primary finding is that while there may be some impact of being Mexican born on sentence length, the negligible differences indicate that offenders who are Mexican born are likely to receive shorter sentences than their native-born counterparts, controlling for a variety of legal and extralegal factors. Directions for future research are highlighted.
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The Effects of Civil Hate Speech Laws: Lessons from Australia
Katharine Gelber & Luke McNamara
Law & Society Review, September 2015, Pages 631–664
Abstract:
This article examines the effects of hate speech laws in Australia. Triangulating data from primary and secondary sources, we examine five hypothesized effects: whether the laws provide a remedy to targets of hate speech, encourage more respectful speech, have an educative or symbolic effect, have a chilling effect, or create “martyrs.” We find the laws provide a limited remedy in the complaints mechanisms, provide a framework for direct community advocacy, and that knowledge of the laws exists in public discourse. However, the complaints mechanism imposes a significant enforcement burden on targeted communities, who still regularly experience hate speech. We find a reduction in the expression of prejudice in mediated outlets, but not on the street. We find no evidence of a chilling effect and we find the risk of free speech martyrs to be marginal. We draw out the implications of these findings for other countries.
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Rules, Standards, and Lower Court Decisions
Joseph Smith & James Todd
Journal of Law and Courts, September 2015, Pages 257-275
Abstract:
This paper evaluates the impact of a higher court articulating doctrine as either a “rule” or a “standard.” The legal doctrine we evaluate concerns police searches based upon information supplied by confidential informants. The Supreme Court’s Aguilar-Spinelli test was a rule, and its Illinois v. Gates “totality of the circumstances” test is a standard. Using a data set of circuit court opinions from 1951 to 1999, we compare circuit-level implementation of these two doctrines. The results suggest that rules are more effective than standards at constraining ideological voting in lower courts.
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The Influence of Biomedical Information and Childhood History on Sentencing
JongHan Kim et al.
Behavioral Sciences & the Law, forthcoming
Abstract:
A recent trend in court is for defense attorneys to introduce brain scans and other forms of biomedical information (BI) into criminal trials as mitigating evidence. The present study investigates how BI, when considered in combination with a defendant's childhood information (CI), can influence the length of a defendant's sentence. We hypothesized that certain combinations of BI and CI result in shorter sentences because they suggest that the defendant poses less of a threat to society. Participants were asked to read accounts of the trial of a murder suspect and, based on the information therein, recommend a sentence as if they were the judge. The defendant was diagnosed with psychopathy, but biomedical information regarding that diagnosis was included or excluded depending on the BI condition. The defendant was further described as growing up in either a loving or abusive family. The results showed that, if BI was present in the trial account, the defendant from an abusive family was perceived as less of a threat to society and received a shorter recommended sentence than if the defendant had been from a loving family. If BI was absent from the account, the pattern was reversed: the defendant from a loving family was perceived as less of a threat to society and received a shorter recommended sentence than if he had been from an abusive family. Implications for the use of BI and CI in court trials are discussed, as well as their relationship to free will and the function of punishment as retribution and utility.
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Putting Bias Into Context: The Role of Familiarity in Identification
Rachel Searston, Jason Tangen & Kevin Eva
Law and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous demonstrations of context effects in the forensic comparison sciences have shown that the number of “match” responses a person makes can be swayed by case information. Less clear is whether these effects are a result of changes in accuracy (e.g., discrimination ability), a shift in response bias (e.g., tendency to say “match” or “no match”) or a mix of the 2. We present a series of experiments where we use a signal detection framework to examine the effects of case information (separately) on forensic comparison accuracy and response bias. We also explore the role of familiarity as 1 potential mechanism for case information to sway accuracy. In Experiment 1, case information about crimes perceived to be more severe swayed people to say “match” more, but had little bearing on their ability to discriminate matching and nonmatching fingerprint pairs. In Experiment 2, case information did affect accuracy when it was familiar (i.e., if a previous similar case was associated with a “match” then people were more likely to also rate the current case as a “match,” even though it was not). Even when we blinded people to all extrinsic case information in Experiment 3, accuracy was significantly affected by the familiarity of the fingerprints. These results demonstrate that contextual factors can have different (and independent) influences on accuracy and response bias and that even subtle information can affect accuracy if it is sufficiently similar to the case or trace at hand.
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Craig Thorley
PLoS ONE, July 2015
Abstract:
This study examined whether or not exposing an eyewitness to a co-witness statement that incorrectly blames an innocent bystander for a crime can increase the likelihood of the eyewitness subsequently blaming the innocent bystander for the crime. It also examined whether or not the perceived age of the co-witness influences this effect. Participant eyewitnesses first watched a video of a crime featuring a perpetrator and an innocent bystander. They then read one of six bogus co-witness statements about the crime. All were presented as having been written by a female co-witness and they differed in terms of her age (young adult or elderly) and who she blamed for the crime (the perpetrator, the innocent bystander, or nobody). One week later the participants were asked who committed the crime. When the young adult co-witness had blamed the innocent bystander just over 40% of participants subsequently did the same. Few participants (less than 8%) in the other conditions subsequently blamed the innocent bystander. The elderly co-witness was also rated as less credible, less competent, and less accurate than the younger co-witness suggesting eyewitnesses were less likely to be influenced by her incorrect statement as they perceived her to be a less reliable source of information. The applied implications of these findings are discussed.
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Victoria Estrada-Reynolds, Jennifer Gray & Narina Nuñez
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Initial juror verdicts have been shown to predict final verdicts, leading researchers to conclude that jurors seek confirmatory information during trial (confirmation bias) or distort information to fit pre-existing biases (pre-decisional distortion). However, Information Integration Theory suggests that individuals are not distorting/ignoring this information, and instead, information influences judgments in the direction of the message. The current study sought to test these competing theories in a juror setting. Mock jurors were presented with the sentencing phase of a capital trial and were asked to give sentence recommendations at eight different time points. Additionally, they were grouped by their pretrial bias as being pro-defense, neutral, or pro-prosecution. Results showed support for Information Integration Theory; although jurors' pretrial bias predicted final sentence, sentence recommendations were affected in the direction of the testimony presented throughout the trial (e.g., pro-defense testimony lowered death penalty decisions across all groups). Implications and future directions are discussed.
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Racial Disparity in Juvenile Diversion: The Impact of Focal Concerns and Organizational Coupling
Rebecca Ericson & Deborah Eckberg
Race and Justice, forthcoming
Purpose: Interpretations of focal concerns and “loose coupling” are used to explain juvenile diversion decisions by police and prosecutors from a large metropolitan county in the Midwest.
Methods: Juveniles eligible for police diversion are compared to those actually diverted using a population of juveniles arrested in eight police urban and suburban agencies. Multinomial logistic regression is used to analyze data on juveniles referred for charging in the same county.
Results: Non-White juveniles were significantly less likely to be diverted by police, formally entering them into the juvenile justice system earlier than their White counterparts. Prosecutors charged, rather than diverted, non-White juveniles significantly more frequently than White juveniles, particularly for theft cases.
Conclusion: The racial disparity observed may result from differing focal concerns and loose coupling in the first stages of the justice system.