How courts make decisions during national emergencies has been a key focus of legal scholarship, yet we know comparatively little about how courts respond to national crises in one of their core functions—criminal sentencing. This article addresses this gap by leveraging the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, to examine the punishment of foreign nationals before and after a national emergency. Using difference-in-difference-in-differences estimation, this article finds little evidence that the severity of sentences for non-U.S. citizens changed appreciably nationwide. This article does find, however, considerable evidence of a more local 9/11 effect, whereby the sentencing gap between citizens and noncitizens widened significantly in the New York and Washington, D.C., District Courts following the attacks. Using restricted data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, this article finds suggestive evidence that the differences in sentencing following 9/11 are likely attributable to changes in judges’ behavior, rather than policy shifts or changes in prosecutorial decisions.

中文翻译：

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危机时期刑事法庭如何应对？来自 9/11 的证据

法院如何在国家紧急情况下做出决定一直是法律学术研究的重点，但我们对法院如何在其核心职能之一——刑事判决中应对国家危机知之甚少。本文通过利用 2001 年 9 月 11 日的恐怖袭击来研究国家紧急状态前后对外国人的惩罚，从而弥补了这一差距。使用差异中差异估计，本文几乎没有发现证据表明非美国公民的刑罚严重程度在全国范围内发生了明显变化。然而，本文确实发现了相当多的证据表明 9/11 的影响更为局部，即袭击事件发生后，纽约和华盛顿特区地方法院的公民和非公民之间的量刑差距显着扩大。使用来自美国的受限数据