The United States has sky-high incarceration rates and a justice system that often hands down different sentences to different people convicted of similar crimes. Giving criminal defendants who plead guilty a choice of which judge hands down their sentence might help tackle the problem, according to research from Chicago Booth’s Barış Ata, Clemson’s Rhys Hester, Stanford’s Lawrence M. Wein, and Booth postdoctoral researcher Yuwei Zhou.
“Public defenders are overworked and make plea bargains, and the judge matters,” Ata says. “What kind of system can we design to give defendants more choice?”
The researchers analyzed data from South Carolina, where Hester and Georgia State University’s Eric L. Sevigny previously conducted research about the sentences that follow felony convictions. On average, Black defendants with similar criminal histories and charges faced longer sentences than equivalent white defendants, that research finds.
But giving defendants more power during sentencing could help even the playing field, finds the more recent study, which analyzes sentencing data from one year (July 1, 2000, through June 30, 2001) in South Carolina. The state has an unusual process of judge rotation: in 2000, 50 judges split their time between the circuit court in their home county and the other circuit courts across the state’s 46 counties. Each county hosted an average of 13 judges that year.
The researchers observe that some defendants engage in “judge shopping,” which in this case means strategically waiting to agree to a plea deal until a judge known to be more lenient on certain crimes is assigned to the case. A judge who goes easier on drug-related charges, for example, might sentence a defendant to probation instead of jail. (In other contexts, the same language is sometimes used to mean filing a lawsuit with the same allegations in multiple jurisdictions in hopes of finding a friendly judge.)