Judge sentencing affected by football results

September 8, 2016 5:48 PM

Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles is the title of an NBER research paper recently published, which showed that unexpected losses by the LSU football team resulted in harsher penalties for juvenile defendants. Reported in the Atlantic, and a .pdf of the draft paper.
posted by wilful (21 comments total)

Man, it is never a good sign when a site puts the subhed "No, seriously." on a story.
posted by Etrigan at 5:58 PM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Also, consider to this Classic paper that found that harsh sentencing is strongly correlated with time-since-food. Then add racial bias. A black kid standing in front of a judge whose team just lost, at the end of that judge's working day, is very likely doomed regardless of the facts of the case.

This is not how it's supposed to be, the scales of justice are not supposed to have a sandwich on one side and a football jersey on the other.
posted by mhoye at 5:59 PM on September 8, 2016 [16 favorites]

Unfortunately, I can’t see an easy way out of this. We all agree that sentencing has to be made by humans, right? There is no formal objective standard for sentencing that can be applied. Most of us accept that a judge should have discretionary powers to consider all sorts of contingent facts, no two cases are the same and they all need to be assessed on their merits. Fixed senetencing leads to all sorts of other consequences. The judge that presided over the case needs to be the sentencing judge in order to be across all of the relevant details. So, judges are human and will continue to make unconscious decisions that favour one party, based on their energy levels, and yes the failure of their football team. How would this be resolved in a perfect world?

Obviously judges need to be well trained and aware of the potential for unconscious bias to creep in, but judges are notoriously difficult to educate (for well known reasons) and I’ll bet that they’re at least notionally aware of the issue and think that they aren’t affected. So I don’t think this is readily solvable.

Ah, lets snark…
posted by wilful at 6:14 PM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

I suppose tackling issues of racial inequality and poverty is too much to hope for. I might as well suggest ending football...
posted by bile and syntax at 6:17 PM on September 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

A bag of trail mix in chambers could alter the course of a human life, then. A nonprofit group should provide regular NatureBox deliveries to judges.

I joke, but that, at least, makes sense; tired people make mistakes, hungry people make mistakes, we all need blood sugar. Still: football? Football? I'm going to have to defer to some less biased individual who has seen, on some occasion, football doing a damned bit of good in American society.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:48 PM on September 8, 2016 [4 favorites]

Do we have to start teaching judges about H.A.L.T.?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 6:54 PM on September 8, 2016 [4 favorites]

I look forward to the day when our self-driving cars, programmed with the most advanced ethics algorithms, can replace these silly human, so-called "judges".
posted by storybored at 7:38 PM on September 8, 2016

Keep looking forward, because it's going to take a different variety of those same silly humans to solve both strong AI and to figure out how to solve and force human ethics to epistemic closure even though ethical judgments are socially context dependent and based on human values that are considered to be a priori truths that have to be taken as assumptions because they can't be derived logically.

We'd basically have to understand ourselves so completely we probably wouldn't even need courts by that point because we could just cure all our social ills with medical science, pharmacology, and bioengineering.

But seriously, what the hell is it about football these days, anyway? It's like the national religion now or something.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:53 PM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

A nonprofit group should provide regular NatureBox deliveries to judges.

Maybe it could start out by just delivering one the day after their football team loses.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 7:54 PM on September 8, 2016

But seriously, what the hell is it about football these days, anyway? It's like the national religion now or something.

It's on more channels than God, so I guess so.
posted by Etrigan at 8:12 PM on September 8, 2016

I worry I'm becoming reflexively skeptical on too many of these, because I used to trust expert papers with stats and now I just don't although I still don't have the stats chops to really dig in. But this seems like a classic candidate for one of those irreproducible results. So many variables and ways to analyze--losses, wins, "unexpected" losses and wins, blowouts, etc.--and one has an effect. Could be right, wrong, or sort of right but vastly overestimate the result effect in one condition and slightly underestimate in other conditions. And since there's just the one data set it'll be hard to ever resolve. If you do the same study for non-juveniles in New Orleans and don't find an effect--or you find it under slightly different conditions ("heartbreaking late-game losses" for example) would that change your opinion of this data?
posted by mark k at 8:37 PM on September 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

The next time some troglodyte declaims on just how irrational and emotional we women become while on our periods, imma shove their face in this study.
posted by romakimmy at 9:47 PM on September 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

Reproducibility in social sciences is notoriously poor, mark k. However, the draft paper does provide the usual detail about methodology, so you’re welcome to critique it within that context. I don’t think this paper is about to launch a whole new sub-field in jurisprudence.
posted by wilful at 10:01 PM on September 8, 2016

maybe the LSU team needs to learn not to be badgered
posted by pyramid termite at 2:19 AM on September 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

The next time some troglodyte declaims on just how irrational and emotional we women become while on our periods, imma shove their face in this study.

I made that comment too, but then my husband pointed out that the gender of the judges was not mentioned in the study. It could just as likely have been female judges who got upset that LSU lost.
posted by chainsofreedom at 5:01 AM on September 9, 2016

from the pdf:

Preliminary Draft-Please Do not Circulate
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:25 AM on September 9, 2016

From the Atlantic,

"They excluded first- and second-degree murder and aggravated rape because those cases require mandatory sentences in Louisiana"

I skimmed the full article, but one test I would do would be to see if LSU losses affected the sentencing for these crimes. If they did, then you're measure of LSU losses is picking something else up. if you don't then that strengthens the result
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:50 AM on September 9, 2016

The solution is obvious: mandate that LSU win all its games. Next case!
posted by languagehat at 7:17 AM on September 9, 2016

Every criminal case should be heard by a three judge tribunal. Yeah. I know. It would be SO costly. Can't be diverting funds from the military and the top 1%. That would be so unamerican.
posted by notreally at 7:31 AM on September 9, 2016

To clarify. Not in lieu of a jury.
posted by notreally at 7:33 AM on September 9, 2016

> Also, consider to this Classic paper that found that harsh sentencing is strongly correlated with time-since-food.

That graph is outrageous, tell me I'm reading it wrong. A correlation, fine, we're all human, but that's going from a 65% chance of a positive judgement to basically zero every time they get hungry.
posted by lucidium at 2:41 PM on September 9, 2016