Must-See: Imran Rasul and Brendon McConnell: Ethnic Sentencing Differentials in the Federal Criminal Justice System

Must-See: More evidence that the federal judicial system needs more wise Latinas on the bench…

Imran Rasul and Brendon McConnell: Ethnic Sentencing Differentials in the Federal Criminal Justice System: “Wed, May 4: 4:00 PM: In the Federal criminal justice system…

…large differences in sentencing outcomes exist between minority and White defendants…. [Does] unobserved heterogeneity of defendants, correlated to their ethnicity, drive these differentials[?] We… estimat[e]… bounds on treatment effects of ethnicity…. Black-White judicial sentencing differentials are not robust to accounting for unobserved heterogeneity across defendants. Hispanic-White differentials are robust along multiple sentencing margins. A candidate explanation is ingroup bias causing outsiders' (Hispanics) to be treated differently toinsiders’ (Whites and Blacks). We test this explanation by exploiting 9-11 as an exogenously timed cue heightening the salience of insider-outsider differences…. Among those sentenced post 9-11, Hispanic-White judicial sentencing differentials are further exacerbated. Decomposition analysis shows that only 7% of the DiD Hispanic-White gap is attributable to observables…. We find evidence for prosecutor’s ingroup biases in setting initial offense charges…. In districts with a higher proportion of Hispanic judges, the Hispanic-White sentencing differential is significantly reduced, consistent with judges’ ingroup biases driving their sentencing decisions…