While efforts to empirically assess the independent influence of, e.g., judge gender and age on an array of judicial outcomes are not uncommon in the judicial decisionmaking literature, a recent paper, The Intersectionality of Age and Gender on the Bench: Are Younger Female Judges Harsher with Serious Crimes?, by Morris Hoffman (Dist. Ct. Judge, St. of Colorado) et al., explores how judge age and gender may interact in ways that account for some of the observed variations in criminal sentencing. Or, more specifically, the paper considers whether "trial judges in their thirties sentence the same thirty years later, when they will likely still be on the bench.”
The paper benefits from an unusually rich data set: "2,995 individual state criminal sentences imposed in Colorado, covering 183 different types of crimes and 285 different judges—180 male and 105 female—over a sixteen-year time span (2001–2016)." Because the data set allows the authors to observe "the same judges sentencing similar crimes as they grow older," a longitudinal view of "the interactive effects of judicial age, gender, and crime level in determining sentences in actual criminal cases” becomes possible.
Some of the paper's core findings might surprise some. "We uncovered a three-way interaction not previously reported in the empirical or experimental literature: For high harm crimes, younger female judges sentenced convicted defendants more harshly than their male and older female colleagues. We controlled for the independent effect of judicial experience, leading to the conclusion that age—and not just experience on the bench—is driving the results.”
The analyses exclude, however, plea bargains, crimes where sufficient sentencing discretion does not exist (e.g., first-degree murder), and crimes which impede efforts to code for the crime's "harm" (e.g., drug possession). Despite any analytical attractiveness, such data exclusions invite questions about the results' generalizability. After all, a decision to exclude plea bargains, for example, removes a potentially sizable slice of criminal sentencing activity from the analyses. Data limitations aside, the paper's core results will likely interest judicial decisionmaking scholars and criminologists. The paper's abstract follows.
“We analyzed sentencing data from sixteen years of criminal trials in the State of Colorado, consisting of almost 3,000 individual sentences, and discovered an interaction effect of harm, gender, and age not reported in any of the empirical or experimental literature. Young female judges punished high harm crimes substantially more than their male and older female colleagues. These results, if confirmed, could have significant strategic and tactical implications for practicing lawyers. They may also inform policies surrounding judicial selection, education, training, and retirement.”
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