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Sex, Politics, and U.S. District Court Outcomes: Examining Variation in Judge-Initiated Downward Guideline Departures

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Abstract

Disparity in sentencing outcomes continues to garner considerable attention in the research literature. Much of the extant literature focuses on the impact of case-level, and to a lesser extent, court-level characteristics on individual sentencing outcomes. At the federal level, recent research by the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC), however, demonstrates significant disparity across U.S. District Courts in aggregate-level outcomes. Specifically, there is considerable disparity in the rates of judge-initiated guidelines departures across U.S. District Courts. The current study examines whether judicial composition and caseload characteristics impact this disparity using panel data. Results indicate that judicial sex and political composition of districts influence judge-initiated guidelines departure rates.

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Notes

  1. Our analysis focuses on downward departures, rather than upward departures, due to the relative infrequency of the latter, for which the rate was approximately two percent over the course of the time period studied.

  2. Within the judicial politics literature, researchers commonly use the political party of the appointing president to measure judges’ political ideology (Epstein et al., 2013); however, others have questioned the validity of using appointing presidents’ political party to measure judges’ ideology (Hübert & Copus, 2021) and outlined other measures, including those utilizing judicial votes (see Ho & Quinn (2010) for a thorough discussion). This debate is beyond the scope of the current study. Instead, we use on the political party of the appointing president to create a measure of the political composition of the courts rather than political ideology.

  3. The MFCS data are compiled and prepared by the United States Sentencing Commission and is available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR): https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/series/83

  4. Consistent with prior sentencing research examining federal sentencing, we excluded the following districts: Puerto Rico, Guam, Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, and the District of Columbia.

  5. When senior status date preceded a judge’s termination date, we used the former as the date on which a judge was no longer serving as a judge on that district court. Senior status allows judges who meet service and age criteria to handle a reduced caseload, while still receiving full salary; however, when a judge takes senior status, a vacancy on the court is created which is filled through the normal process. Senior status judges are less active and present on the court (handling only approximately 20% of total district and appellate courts’ caseloads; see https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/about-federal-judges). Therefore, we determined that the judicial composition of a district is better represented by the judges on full, active status rather than including senior status judges (see Schanzenbach & Tiller, 2007 for a similar approach).

  6. Below guideline range and above guideline range categories capture both judge-initiated departures and judge-initiated deviations from the guidelines. The former captures sentences in which the judge sentences above or below the guideline range for “reasons that the USSC recognizes as legitimate” whereas the latter are sentences in which the judge sentences above or below the guideline range for reasons that are not recognized by the USSC (Ulmer & Johnson, 2019, footnote 12). Consistent with Ulmer & Johnson, we conceptualize both departures and deviations as judge-initiated departures.

  7. Includes 5K1.1/Substantial Assistance, Early Disposition/5K3.1, and Government Sponsored-Below Range sentences.

  8. We also estimated models including the percent of the district cases that were immigration cases and the percent of cases involving non-citizens, which produced very similar results. However, both variables were highly collinear with percent Hispanic. As such, our final models included only percent Hispanic and the control for border districts, which account for the vast majority of immigration cases throughout the district courts (https://www.uscourts.gov/news/2013/05/08/southwest-border-courts-continue-lead-immigration-cases).

  9. Mean presumptive sentence and caseload were both transformed by dividing them by 1000 for the panel model estimation to enable the Hausman test to function properly and for ease of reporting in tables.

  10. Results from estimation of a fixed effects model were substantively very similar to those reported above for the random effects model. In the fixed effects model, the coefficient for Caseload was not significant, whereas the coefficients for both Female Cases and White Cases were significant.

  11. The authors thank one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this possibility.

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  1. University of West Florida, 11000 University Parkway, Pensacola, FL, 32514, USA

    Matthew S. Crow & Natalie Goulette

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Crow, M.S., Goulette, N. Sex, Politics, and U.S. District Court Outcomes: Examining Variation in Judge-Initiated Downward Guideline Departures. Am J Crim Just 48, 295–318 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-021-09648-3

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