Centenial Celebration

Transaction Search Form: please type in any of the fields below.

Date: November 22, 2024 Fri

Time: 11:39 am

Results for judicial sentencing

1 results found

Author: Eren, Ozkan

Title: Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles

Summary: Employing the universe of juvenile court decisions in a U.S. state between 1996 and 2012, we analyze the effects of emotional shocks associated with unexpected outcomes of football games played by a prominent college team in the state. We investigate the behavior of judges, the conduct of whom should, by law, be free of personal biases and emotions. We find that unexpected losses increase disposition (sentence) lengths assigned by judges during the week following the game. Unexpected wins, or losses that were expected to be close contests ex-ante, have no impact. The effects of these emotional shocks are asymmetrically borne by black defendants. We present evidence that the results are not influenced by defendant or attorney behavior or by defendants' economic background. Importantly, the results are driven by judges who have received their bachelor's degrees from the university with which the football team is affiliated. Different falsification tests and a number of auxiliary analyses demonstrate the robustness of the findings. These results provide evidence for the impact of emotions in one domain on a behavior in a completely unrelated domain among a uniformly highly-educated group of individuals (judges), with decisions involving high stakes (sentence lengths). They also point to the existence of a subtle and previously-unnoticed capricious application of sentencing.

Details: Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016. 58p.

Source: Internet Resource: NBER Working Paper 22611: Accessed September 7, 2016 at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22611.pdf

Year: 2016

Country: United States

URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22611.pdf

Shelf Number: 147856

Keywords:
Judges
Judicial Sentencing
Juvenile Court
Juvenile Offenders
Juvenile Sentencing
Sports