heterogeneity we observe in the racial sentencing gap may actually be due to heterogeneity in treatment of type of crime. The results of this analysis indicate that there may be a difference in treatment of drug and non-drug crimes, but that there is still a heterogeneous treatment of race within non-drug crimes. One limitation to our approach is that, while we can statistically establish that race matters in the courtroom, we cannot formally detect whether this is due to some judges discriminating against African-Americans, or some judges discriminating against Whites, or a mixture of both. In itself, though, the evidence we uncover on the importance of race in judicial decision-making should be of direct relevance to legal policy. The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. Section II provides a brief overview of prior work on the role of race in judicial decisions. In Section III we describe the data from the courts of . We discuss our econometric methodology, including the simulation procedure in Section IV. In Section V we report our basic results, and we discuss the influence of the crime category in Section VI. Section VII concludes. II. Literature Review There has been a great deal of scholarship investigating the role of race in the courtroom. Here we briefly summarize some of the previous research most relevant to this study. Many early studies were cross-sectional, and frequently used data sets that were not rich enough to include controls for important case and individual characteristics, such as criminal history, crime severity, and income. Thus it is unsurprising that an early review of the literature found a lack of consensus among these studies. Daly and Tonry (1997) note some of the shortcomings in some of the work between the and 1960’s
heterogeneity we observe in the racial sentencing gap may actually be due to heterogeneity in treatment of type of crime. The results of this analysis indicate that there may be a difference in treatment of drug and non-drug crimes, but that there is still a heterogeneous treatment of race within non-drug crimes. One limitation to our approach is that, while we can statistically establish that race matters in the courtroom, we cannot formally detect whether this is due to some judges discriminating against African-Americans, or some judges discriminating against Whites, or a mixture of both. In itself, though, the evidence we uncover on the importance of race in judicial decision-making should be of direct relevance to legal policy. The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. Section II provides a brief overview of prior work on the role of race in judicial decisions. In Section III we describe the data from the courts of . We discuss our econometric methodology, including the simulation procedure in Section IV. In Section V we report our basic results, and we discuss the influence of the crime category in Section VI. Section VII concludes. II. Literature Review There has been a great deal of scholarship investigating the role of race in the courtroom. Here we briefly summarize some of the previous research most relevant to this study. Many early studies were cross-sectional, and frequently used data sets that were not rich enough to include controls for important case and individual characteristics, such as criminal history, crime severity, and income. Thus it is unsurprising that an early review of the literature found a lack of consensus among these studies. Daly and Tonry (1997) note some of the shortcomings in some of the work between the 1960’s and
AbramsBertrandMullainathanJudges062510.docx