Abstract

This paper examines how the identities of judges on multimember courts interact with case context to influence judicial decision making. Specifically, I leverage variation in panel composition and defendant race to examine race-based panel effects in death penalty cases on the Courts of Appeals. Using a dataset that accounts for several characteristics of a defendant and his crime, I find that the assignment of a black judge to an otherwise all-nonblack panel substantially increases the probability that the panel will grant relief to a defendant on death row—but only in cases where the defendant is black. The size of the increase is substantively large: conditional on the defendant being black, a three-judge panel with a single African-American judge is about 23 percentage points more likely to grant relief than an all-nonblack panel. These results have important implications for assessing the role of racial diversity on the federal courts and contribute to the empirical literature on the application of the death penalty in the United States.

摘要

本文研究了多成员法院法官的身份如何与案件背景相互作用以影响司法决策。具体来说，我利用小组组成和被告种族的变化来检查上诉法院死刑案件中基于种族的小组效应。使用一个解释被告及其罪行的几个特征的数据集，我发现将一名黑人法官分配给一个原本全非黑人的小组大大增加了该小组向死囚牢房的被告提供救济的可能性——但仅在被告是黑人的情况下。增加的幅度相当大：以被告为黑人为条件，由一名非裔美国法官组成的三名法官小组比全非黑人小组给予救济的可能性高出约 23 个百分点。