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Tuesday, May 22nd, 2018

Republican-appointed judges sentence black offenders to 3 months longer on average than whites: study

Author:     DAVID EDWARDS
Source:     Raw Story
Publication Date:     21 MAY 2018 AT 12:39 ET
Link: Republican-appointed judges sentence black offenders to 3 months longer on average than whites: study
Stephan:   In 1964, when President Johnson signed the voting rights act, I thought that, "well we are still far from being racially blind, but we're on our way. Civil Rights worked." I was wrong. I think racism is worse in some quarters than it was in the 60s. Consider this:  

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A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Republican-appointed judges on average give black Americans sentences that are three months longer than those given to white convicts.

In a paper released this month, researchers Alma Cohen and Crystal Yang concluded that a judge’s political ideology can impact the sentencing of non-white criminals.

“In sharp contrast to the prior literature relying on court-level variation, we find economically meaningful and statistically significant evidence that judge political affiliation is a source of disparities in federal sentencing,” the authors explained. “We find that Republican-appointed judges give substantially longer prison sentences to black offenders versus observably similar non-black offenders compared to Democratic-appointed judges within the same district court.”

“The racial gap by political affiliation is 3.0 months, approximately 65 percent of the baseline racial sentence gap,” the paper observed. “We also find that Republican-appointed judges give female defendants 2.0 months less in prison than similar male defendants compared to Democratic-appointed judges, 17 percent of the baseline gender sentence gap.”

The authors noted that much of the […]

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