Posted May 30, 2021, 5:25 PM UTC
Interesting that Republicans are responsible for a huge part of the racial gap, but a much smaller amount of the gender gap. The Patriarchy isn’t so right/left, it seems!
Doesn't that mean they are increasing the gender gap in sentencing?
Yes, but not by much. It means that either Republican judges are sexist in giving women breaks (but only a little sexist), or both Republican and Democratic judges are sexist, but Republicans slightly more so. I'd bet a lot of money on the second one.
On the whole the male/female sentencing gap is significantly larger than the black/white sentencing gap, so I agree that the second scenario is more likely.
Just to be clear, the headline of this thread is a quote from that part of the paper where the authors are using an equation that is not controlling for the "final offense level" (as used in federal sentencing guidelines) given to a criminal defendant prior to sentencing. When the authors take that factor into account, then Republican judges, relative to their Democratic counterparts, give black defendants ~1.6 more months in prison on average. R2 under this model = 0.778 which is fairly decent.
This represents a 2.7% increase in average prison sentence for a black defendant when compared to a non-black defendant should they be sentenced by a Republican judge as opposed to a Democrat judge.
To be frank I was expecting a larger % increase, but nonetheless, (1) the difference is there and can be concretely measured, and (2) what's shocking is that (as another posted alluded to) having a Republican judge explains about 34% of the racial sentencing gap between blacks and non-blacks.
The headline is a quote from the abstract and represent the control specifications that the authors say they prefer:
In our preferred specification, we exclude any controls for base offense level and final offense level because of the possibility that offense level may be endogenous to the judge, as discussed previously
For example:
As documented by other scholars, however, the base and final offense levels may be endogenous if judges independently make findings of fact, such as drug weight or the use of a firearm, a phenomenon broadly known as “offense level manipulation” (Schanzenbach and Tiller 2008). In addition, other actors may engage in differential fact-finding depending on which judge is assigned to the case. For example, prosecutors may bargain with defense counsel over the facts of a case in order to apply an offense level adjustment under the guidelines, such as a mitigating role reduction in order to lower the recommended guidelines sentence (Schulhofer and Nagel 1997).
See also the discussion on page 173.
I agree with the authors in excluding that control and believe offense level manipulation is the most likely explanation for the difference, considering the other controls. It also doesn't make sense to me that there would be no differences between judges in fixed variables such as criminal history that correlate with offense level but that the offense level still differ significantly.
Hasn't the accusation of offense level manipulation and arbitrary plea bargaining been the skeleton in the closet of all determinate grid based sentencing systems since they came into being?
The party that gets elected by race baiting bigots is.... racist? Gasp! We’ve cracked the code!
Talk about lying with statistics. Unless they are comparing defendants charged with the same offenses under the same jurisdiction (state or federal) and in the same time frame (eg avoiding any changes in sentencing law or guidelines) and with the same quality of legal counsel, this is nothing more than race baiting codswallop.
I don't think you understand how statistical analysis works. It's less about comparing like-for-like and more about looking for what variables account for what variance. The sample size is large enough that the factors you are referring to are going to regress to the mean, and the authors specifically mention offence severity amongst the other factors that are being controlled for.
It isn't race baiting codswallop, no matter how much your cognitive dissonance needs it to be.
EDIT: holy shit, look at this guy's post history. He just haunts law-related subreddits shitting out anti-left rhetoric. Get a life, psycho.
Only question is if they're currently clerking for a regressive bastion, on the shortlist to do so, or just a resentful edgelord angry that not everyone intuits their views as immutable fact and the right and just order of the Universe. -_-
It's pretty typical for y'all to dig into someone's post history rather than make fact based arguments...
He did give you a fact based argument. You just didn't acknowledge or address it.
These types never do.
So you're just gonna ignore everything except for his last statement lol
That's how their world works. If they can pick one thing out to show how they're the victim, that's the new topic they're discussing whether you want to or not. It's exhausting.
Por que no los dos?
You may want to read it.
Too many big words and not enough pictures for 'em.
This is pretty damn wild. The 65% figure is nuts. They appear to tackle confounding variables pretty well. This footnote sticks out:
I wonder about crime rate in the areas, not yet sure if they do it justice.
As far as I can tell, they acknowledge that black defendants were more likely to have criminal history, but they did not run a separate analysis to check for disparity in sentencing between democratic and republican appointed judges taking this factor into account, or I missed where they did so, or they did not clearly explain how they did so.
They mentioned that there was no difference in the criminal history of defendants sentenced by the two groups of judges. This leaves open the possibility that the primary phenomenon described by the study occurs under a mechanism where democratic appointed judges are more lenient towards black defendants despite their criminal histories. I don't think this possibility, or this limitation, was explicitly stated by the authors.
Criminal history and offense type are included in their fixed effects, but they don't say how they measure those things.
Yep. A rather significant issue, I'm afraid. More importantly, criminal history does not seem to have been specifically examined as a mechanism of the disparity in sentencing.
I suspect that analysis of prior convictions may not have been thorough or even possible, possibly because the data was not available. However, without their disclosure, who knows what's the case?
I am not really sure I understand your criticism here. Their analysis is about the effects of partisanship on sentencing decisions, specifically their interest is in an interaction between judicial partisanship and defendant race. They show that republican judges give harsher sentences to black people, net of all controlled factors. Those controlled factors include the defendant's criminal history. So criminal history is examined as a mechanism of sentencing disparity, it is in the model. It is just not the focus of their paper.
I think that theory is contradicted by the Increased Judicial Discretion section beginning on page 179.
No, doesn't seem so. This section addresses changes seen before and after Booker. If anything, that section appears to support that democratic appointed judges are motivated to give reduced sentences to black defendants, as they found:
Unless I'm mistaken, pre or post Booker, there are ranges available for judges to select from within sentencing guidelines, which specifically should take into account the defendants criminal history. I still don't see an analysis that investigates whether a particular type of judge is more or less likely to account for a black defendant's criminal history in sentencing. We simply see in this section that when the guidelines were no longer mandatory, democratic appointed judges reduced the sentencing of black defendants. It would not be necessary to see any change in Republican appointed sentencing of black defendants post Booker unless their behavior was being constrained by the mandatory guidelines in the same way that the Democratic appointed judges apparently were.
Please, tell me if I'm misinterpreting this.
Sorry, I missed that part. You may be right. I will have to read the paper more carefully.