GOP Judges More Unfair In Sentencing Than Dem. Judges

(This graphic image is from Colorado Peak Politics.)

I have been called a bleeding-heart liberal. That's OK. But I also worked in various aspects of law enforcement for nearly 30 years, and I believe crime should be punished (especially crimes against the safety or property of others) -- and I believe serious crimes should come with a prison sentence.

However, I also believe that when justice is meted out, it should be done fairly -- with no regard for race, ethnicity, gender, or economic status. But too often our courts do not operate that way. Some judges give Blacks harsher sentences than Whites for the same crimes  -- and women are given lesser sentences than men for the same crime. This is unfair, and makes a mockery of the "equal protection" clause of the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment.

Unfair sentencing is wrong, whether the offending judge is a Democrat or a Republican. But a new study shows that Republican Judges are more unfair in sentencing than Democratic judges -- significantly so. The study was done by Harvard Law School professors Alma Cohen and Crystal S. Yang. They studied 1,400 federal judges over a period of 15 years.

What they found was very disturbing, but not surprising. It seems that Republican judges gives Blacks harsher sentences than Whites, and they also give women lesser sentences than they give men -- all for the very same crimes. They found:

Linking approximately half a million defendants to their sentencing judges, we find that Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants to longer prison terms than non-black defendants compared to Democratic-appointed judges.

Republican-appointed judges also sentence female defendants to shorter prison terms than males compared to Democratic-appointed judges.

These racial and gender disparities by political affiliation emerge at both the fact-finding and sentencing stages of the criminal justice process, and are robust to controlling for other judge and court characteristics, such as judge race, gender, and proxies for racial attitudes.

We also find that differences in disparities by political affiliation, particularly racial gaps in sentence length, expand when judges were given more discretion after the mandatory Guidelines were rendered advisory. Moreover, these enlarged differences cannot be solely explained by differences in the willingness of Republican-appointed and Democratic-appointed judges to depart from the Guidelines. These results suggest that a consequence of the advisory Guidelines system is an expansion of sentencing disparities by judge political affiliation.

Republican and Democratic-appointed judges treat defendants differently on the basis of their race and gender given that we observe robust disparities despite the random assignment of cases to judges within the same court. Our results also indicate that these disparities are not solely due to differences in the treatment of certain offense types by judge political affiliation as we find large racial and gender gaps even within specific crimes such as drug offenses. More speculatively, our results are consistent with some judges holding discriminatory attitudes given that we find larger disparities among judges who serve in courts from states with higher racial bias, which are disproportionately located in the South.

Our results suggest that a judge’s political ideology may affect how he or she views the dangerousness or blameworthiness of different defendants by race and gender.

According to our findings, racial disparities in sentencing would be almost halved if federal district courts were comprised of all Democratic-appointed judges, and reduced by more than five percent if courts were comprised of ten percent more judges appointed by Democratic presidents. In recent decades, the typical president has appointed roughly 160 district court judges in a four-year term.16 Under  the current composition of the federal court system, these appointments could change the partisan composition of district courts by 15 to 20 percentage points, which could substantially alter gender and racial disparities in the criminal justice system depending on the political affiliation of the appointing president. The potential to affect disparities is even larger for two-term presidents.