Job Market Paper
Does discretion by elected judges benefit defendants or judges?: Evidence from public defense case assignment (Draft coming soon!)
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, since judges are elected officials, and those 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 restricting discretionary case assignments reduced donations from defense attorneys to judges by 19 percent and lowered guilty conviction rates by 9-13 percent. These results indicate that discretionary assignments created 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) Accepted at the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
Abstract: While most criminal defendants rely on assigned counsel for legal representation, 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 in Travis County, Texas, 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) Under review
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.
More experience, more mistakes? The impact of experience on errors in jury decision-making (Draft available upon request)
Shades of justice: The disparate impact of court-appointed attorney quality (with Mark Hoekstra and Maya Mikdash)
Selected Work in Progress
Gender Discrimination in Criminal Justice: Evidence from Felony Indictment Decisions