Job Market Paper
Abstract: There is significant concern regarding whether publicly-funded defense attorneys provide adequate legal assistance, as indigent defendants often face worse case outcomes than those with retained counsel. One potential solution is to allow judges discretion in assigning cases to court-appointed attorneys to incentivize better legal assistance and improve attorney-defendant match quality. On the other hand, such assignments can raise concerns regarding quid pro quo in settings where judges are elected and where attorneys, who are paid per case, may donate to judges to secure case assignments. This paper examines this question using data from a large county that began prohibiting discretionary case assignments in 2015. I find that prohibiting discretionary case assignments reduces donations from defense attorneys to judges by 21 percent and lowers guilty conviction rates by 9-13 percent. These results indicate that discretionary assignments create corruption risks while worsening outcomes for low-income defendants.
Publication
The role of race in the legal representation of low-income defendants (with Maya Mikdash) Forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
Abstract: Little is known about the role of race in the defense of low-income defendants by court-appointed attorneys. Exploiting the quasi-random assignment of court-appointed attorneys to cases, we test whether attorneys secure better deals for same-race defendants. Results indicate that while Black and White attorneys are similarly effective at representing White defendants, Black defendants who are represented by White rather than Black attorneys are 14-16 percent more likely to have their charges dismissed and 15-26 percent less likely to be incarcerated. Moreover, we find no evidence that having a different-race attorney increases the likelihood of re-offending in the future.
Working Papers
Are juries racially discriminatory? Evidence from the race-blind charging of grand jury defendants with and without racially distinctive names (with Mark Hoekstra and Meradee Tangvatcharapong)
Abstract: We implement five different tests of whether grand juries, which are drawn from a representative cross-section of the public, discriminate against Black defendants when deciding to prosecute felony cases. Three tests exploit that while jurors do not directly observe defendant race, jurors do observe the "Blackness" of defendants' names. All three tests--an audit-study-style test, a traditional outcome-based test, and a test that estimates racial bias using blinded/unblinded comparisons after purging omitted variable bias--indicate juries do not discriminate based on race. Two additional tests indicate racial bias explains at most 0.3 percent of the Black-White felony conviction gap.
Abstract: While most agents in the criminal justice system, such as prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges, are experienced, case outcomes are determined largely by what a jury of inexperienced non-professionals does or would do. This paper examines whether experience leads to fewer errors in grand juries' indictment decisions. I study how juries’ Type 1 errors (i.e., indicting defendants later found not guilty) and Type 2 errors (i.e., releasing defendants who would have been found guilty had they been indicted) evolve over the course of their service. Using a dataset of over 600,000 cases and an identification at infinity approach, I find that both error rates rise as juries spend more time in service. Results indicate that, over their three-month panel assignments, grand jurors become more likely to mistakenly release cases that would have resulted in convictions, while also becoming more likely to indict cases that ultimately fail to yield felony convictions. This study contributes to the productivity literature by examining how the duration of service can impact attentiveness. It also offers policy insights for designing the grand jury process, where lay citizens make consequential decisions.
Selected Works in Progress
Gender discrimination in criminal justice: Evidence from felony indictment decisions
Shades of justice: The disparate impact of court-appointed attorney quality (with Mark Hoekstra and Maya Mikdash)